How to Install Webmin on CentOS 7

System administration is a vital part of managing infrastructure today, whether you are a seasoned sysadmin or a humble developer trying to juggle many hats simultaneously. Normally, the way to go about it is the command line, which happens to be the most powerful offering in a Linux system.

 

However, for many people, the command line is less than ideal. This might be because they’re not into DevOps that much, or maybe because they come from a different operating system and don’t have the luxury of time to sit down and patiently learn the Linux command line and its various quirks.

 

In such cases, webmin is the tool preferred by many. Webmin is the complete opposite of the command line: it’s a graphical interface for managing most of the parts of the system easily and intuitively. If you’re on CentOS 7 and are wondering how to install webmin (or even what webmin can do for you), read on.

What’s webmin Useful For?

 

Everyday tasks of system administration, such as changing passwords or updating packages, can be done through the command line. But is becomes hard to keep it all in the head because of the number of switches (options) a typical Linux command has. Moreover, some of the command names really throw a curve ball to your brain and are hard to remember or spell correctly. Not with webmin.

 

Once webmin is set up (which we’ll do in just about a minute), here are some screen shots of how webmin can make your life easier.

 

Here’s how easy it is on webmin to change a password:

 

 

Easy, right?!

 

What about creating cron jobs? Well, that’s a breeze, too:

 

 

But wait, there’s more! If you’re running a MySQL server on CentOS 7, you don’t even need a separate program to operate the database. Webmin offers a simple interface to view and edit data in MySQL:

 

 

Hopefully, if you’re a visual person, you’re sold on the merits of webmin for the CentOS 7 system. Now, as promised, let’s move on to how to install this.

Installing webmin on CentOS 7

 

Before you begin, make sure you have Apache server installed and running as default. That’s because like PhpMyAdmin, the webmin package is configured to run seamlessly with Apache. It’s possible to make it run with other web servers, but the number of hoops you’ll have to jump through is just not worth it.

 

First off, install the dependencies for the webmin package. This can be done by running the following command:

 

$ sudo yum -y install perl perl-Net-SSLeay openssl perl-IO-Tty

 

Enter your root password when prompted, and you should be done soon.

If you go the webmin download page, you’ll see various target platforms listed. The one we’re interested in is the RPM format (at the time of writing the package name is webmin-1.860-1.noarch.rpm).

 

So, the next step is to download the package to your system:

 

$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.860-1.noarch.rpm

 

This will download the file webmin-1.860-1.noarch.rpm in the present directory.

 

And now, it’s time to install!

 

$ sudo rpm -U webmin-1.831-1.noarch.rpm

 

And you’re done!

 

There are just two more minor things you need to do: start the webmin service and enable it to run on system boot. The commands for these, respectively, are:

 

$ sudo service webmin start

 

$ sudo chkconfig webmin on

 

With this, you are ready to start using webmin. Just point your browser to https://<Server-IP-Address>:10000 and enjoy!


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