How to Install Fantastico

To install Fantastico on your cPanel/WHM server, SSH to your server and enter following commands, one per line (you may also copy/paste): 

cd /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi
wget -N http://files.betaservant.com/files/free/fantastico_whm_admin.tgz
tar -xzpf fantastico_whm_admin.tgz
rm -rf fantastico_whm_admin.tgz

Now go to WHM → Add-Ons (Plugins on v11.x or higher) → Fantastico De Luxe WHM Admin (scroll down the left menu). Follow the on screen instructions. If you get a Source Guardian error when you go to Fantastico for the first time, just run this command: 

chmod -R 0755 /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/etc/ixed

After the installation is complete, click on “Settings” and go through the options. While some settings are not important, some other (marked below with an *) are essential for a proper functioning of Fantastico installations:

Language: Select the language for the admin backend AND default language for users without a language selected. Email notifications: Enter an email address in order to receive notifications when users perform installations using Fantastico. Master files settings (*): If you are not an advanced user who modifies the master files, leave this to “Remove”. Change this only if you know what you are doing. PHPsuexec (*): VERY ESSENTIAL!!! Changing this value will not install or de-install phpsuexec for you. It will only tell Fantastico that you have phpsuexec installed or not installed on your server. Change to “installed” if you perform installations which produce an “Internal Server Error”. Notice: Changes will not apply to existing installations! You have to re-install in order to have working installations. Also note that in newer versions this is called SuPHP. Path to netPBM: Enter the full path to the netPBM binaries in order to enable Gallery installations. As long as this field has no value, your users will not be able to install Gallery. Select Fantastico licensing and files server: If the Fantastico pages take long to load switch to the server that works best for you. Fantastico will auto-switch if connections time out. Update preference: Select latest version (sometimes experimental) or stable version (best working).

Notes

  • If your users don't see a Fantastico link in their cPanel: Go to WHM and edit the “default” Features List. Activate Fantastico.
  • Centos 5.x (as well as some newer versions of Fedora Core) come with a wget version that is not compatible with Fantastico. Here are the steps that you need to take to remove buggy version of wget and install a working one:
    rpm -qa wget
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/wget-1.10.2-3.2.1.i386.rpm
rpm -e wget
rpm -ivh --force wget-1.10.2-3.2.1.i386.rpm
rpm -qa wget
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