Chyrp Lite

Introduction

Chyrp Lite is an ultra-lightweight blogging engine written in PHP.

Prerequisites and assumptions

The following are the minimum requirements for using this procedure:

• The ability to run commands as the root user or use sudo to elevate privileges
• Familiarity with a command-line editor. The author is using vi or vim here, but substitute in your favorite editor

Installing Caddy

We will use Caddy as the web server. To install Caddy, you need first to install the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) and run updates:

sudo dnf -y install epel-release

Then install Caddy:

sudo dnf copr enable @caddy/caddy

Perform an upgrade to ensure the latest packages are on your system:

sudo dnf upgrade

Subsequently, open the Caddyfile:

vi /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Add the following to your Caddyfile:

your.domain.name {
        root * /var/www/chyrp-lite
        file_server
        php_fastcgi 127.0.0.1:9000
}

For incus containers

While this procedure works perfectly fine in an incus container, incus does not come with the firewall enabled. You can install and use firewalld on a container, it just is not there by default. If you want to apply the firewall rules to your container, something that might be very important if you are using a public domain, then just be aware that you will have to install:

sudo dnf install firewalld

and enable:

sudo systemctl enable --now firewalld

Before continuing this procedure.

Save the file with :wq! and then open the corresponding firewall ports:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Finally, start Caddy:

systemctl enable --now caddy

Installing PHP

Note

If you are running Rocky Linux 8.x or 9.x, substitute "8" or "9" next to the release in the Remi package install line.

To install PHP, you will need the Remi repository. To install the Remi repository, run the following:

dnf install https://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-10.rpm

Then install PHP and the required modules:

dnf install -y php83-php php83-php-session php83-php-json php83-php-ctype php83-php-filter php83-php-libxml php83-php-simplexml php83-php-mbstring php83-php-pdo php83-php-curl

Next, open the PHP configuration file:

vi /etc/opt/remi/php83/php-fpm.d/www.conf

Go down to the listen = line and set it to the following:

listen = 127.0.0.1:9000

Exit vi with :wq! and enable PHP:

systemctl enable --now php83-php-fpm.service

Installing Chyrp

Install chyrp-lite by first going to the release page. Copy the URL for the latest release, by right-clicking on the source.zip file, and copying the link. Change to the /var/www directory:

cd /var/www

Paste the URL you copied for the source.zip file of the latest release into wget:

wget [URL you copied]

Next, decompress and move the extracted folder:

unzip v2026.01.zip
mv chyrp-lite-2026.01/ chyrp-lite

Set the correct permissions on the chyrp-lite folder:

chown -R apache:apache chyrp-lite/

Set up a data directory for storing the SQLite database:

mkdir chyrp-lite-data
chown -R apache:apache chyrp-lite-data/

For incus container installs, you can skip the SELinux steps. SELinux does not exist in an incus container, nor is it supported.

Next, set up the SELinux file contexts:

semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t "/var/www/chyrp-lite(/.*)?"
semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t "/var/www/chyrp-lite-data(/.*)?"
restorecon -Rv /var/www/chyrp-lite
restorecon -Rv /var/www/chyrp-lite-data

On a client machine, open up a web browser to https://example.com/install.php and run the installation program (replace example.com with your actual domain name or hostname):

In the Database section, select a pathname in the chyrp-lite-data directory made earlier, such as /var/www/chyrp-lite-data/sqlite.db.

Then, complete the other fields, which should be self-explanatory.

Next, click Install me and then Take me to my site. You should now be able to visit a completed installation of your Chyrp site:

Conclusion

Considering that WordPress has evolved into a Swiss army knife of web development, it is not surprising some webmasters (the author included) would prefer a lightweight blogging engine. Chyrp Lite is perfect for those users.

Author: Neel Chauhan

Contributors: Steven Spencer, Ganna Zhyrnova