Testimonials
What our customers say about Team Password Manager

Full installation of Team Password Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 with NGINX

Current Team Password Manager version: 12.160.277

This tutorial explains how to install Team Password Manager on a Linux Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) system with the following components: NGINX, MySQL 8, PHP 8.2, Sourceguardian Loader and a commercial TLS/SSL certificate for https.

Similar versions of this tutorial with lower versions of the components can be found here: Install on Ubuntu 20.04 with NGINX.

A similar version of this tutorial with Apache instead of NGINX can be found here: Install on Ubuntu with Apache.

To be able to follow this tutorial you'll need: a running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system (preferably with nothing else installed), which can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet, root access to this system and a non-root user which we'll use to do everything with sudo for security. You'll also need some basic Linux knowledge.


Basic settings

We'll be creating a Team Password Manager installation that will be accessed using this URL: https://tpm.mycompany.com. We'll be referring to this URL throughout this document, so adjust it to your own URL each time.

In this section we're going to prepare the system with some basic settings:


• Make sure the system is updated with the following commands:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade


• Update the hosts file (/etc/hosts) with the hostname and the Team Password Manager URL. To do it:

1. Get the hostname of your computer with this command: $ hostname

2. Edit /etc/hosts and enter the following line:

IP ADDRESS hostname tpm.mycompany.com

If, for instance, the IP address ofyour server is 1.2.3.4 and your hostname is tpm-hostname, this line should be:

1.2.3.4 tpm-hostname tpm.mycompany.com


• Set the timezone of your server. To do it, execute the following command and select the timezone you want:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

We've chosen London, in which case the outcome is:

Current default time zone: 'Europe/London'
Local time is now:      Mon Apr 25 09:27:52 GMT 2023.
Universal Time is now:  Mon Apr 25 09:27:52 UTC 2023.

You can also check the date using this command: $ date


• Enable the firewall (ufw), also enabling SSH through it. Execute these two commands to do it:

$ sudo ufw allow ssh

$ sudo ufw enable


• Install fail2ban. fail2ban is an application that bans IP addresses that try nasty things on our server (like forcing login attempts), so it's a good application to have. To install and configure it using its basic settings execute the following commands:

$ sudo apt install fail2ban

$ sudo cp /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.conf /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.local


• Turn on network time protocol (ntp) so that the server time is synced over the Internet. This is a must if you plan to use 2 factor authentication in Team Password Manager. Execute the following commands to enable ntp:

$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp off

$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp on

$ sudo ufw allow ntp


NGINX installation

We'll be using NGINX as our web server. To install it use the following command:

$ sudo apt install nginx


Once it's installed enable http and https ports (80, 443) through the firewall:

$ sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'

$ sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTPS'


Check that NGINX is running with this command:

$ sudo systemctl status nginx


To test that NGINX is running in your server you can open a web browser and type the IP address of your server in the address bar. If everything is ok you should see the following NGINX default page:

NGINX default page

MySQL 8 installation

We're going to use MySQL 8 as the database for Team Password Manager. MySQL 8 is the default version of MySQL that installs with Ubuntu 22.04, so to install just use this command:

$ sudo apt install mysql-server

Once it's installed, run the security script to set the root password and some additional settings:

$ sudo mysql_secure_installation

You can safely set the following options in the script:

  • Medium level of the password validation policy (Length >= 8, numeric, mixed case, and special characters).
  • Remove anonymous users.
  • Disallow root login remotely.
  • Remove test database and access to it.

Once the script is finished you can test the connection using the following command:

$ sudo mysql

This will connect to the MySQL console using root because you're using sudo.

You'll be placed at the MySQL prompt: mysql>. Just type exit to return to the system prompt.


PHP 8.2 installation

Since PHP 8.2 is not the default version of PHP in Ubuntu 22.04, we'll need to add the Ondřej Surý PPA into our system. To do it, execute these two commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

$ sudo apt update

Because we're using NGINX we need to install the php-fpm (php8.2-fpm) module, which connects PHP to the NGINX. To install PHP and the modules that are required to run Team Password Manager, enter this command:

$ sudo apt install php8.2 php8.2-fpm php8.2-cli php8.2-mysql php8.2-mbstring php8.2-ldap php8.2-curl php8.2-gd php8.2-xml

Check that you've installed the correct PHP version using this command: $ php -v. You should see an output similar to this one:

PHP 8.2.11 (cli) (built: Oct  6 2023 09:47:18) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.2.11, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v8.2.11, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

Set PHP's timezone to match the one of your server's: edit /etc/php/8.2/fpm/php.ini and set the following entry with the same timezone you set in the Basic settings section (all the PHP timezones can be found here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php). In our case we set it to "Europe/London":

date.timezone = "Europe/London"


Configuring NGINX to serve Team Password Manager and use PHP

As stated earlier, we're going to access the Team Password Manager installation using this URL: https://tpm.mycompany.com. To make this possible, you need to do two things:

1. Create a new A/AAAA record in your DNS manager so that tpm.mycompany.com resolves to the server's IP address.

2. Configure a server block in NGINX to accept tpm.mycompany.com (for port 80 (http) and 443 (https)) and make it execute the Team Password Manager installation. (Note: server blocks in NGINX are similar to virtual hosts in Apache)

Let's explain them in more detail:

1. Go to the DNS manager for your domain and create an A record (AAAA if IPv6) for your tpm.mycompany.com subdomain, specifying the IP address of your server and the default TTL value if you need to set one. To test open the browser and enter tpm.mycompany.com in the address bar. You should see the NGINX default page. Note that this can take a while to propagate through all the DNS servers so it's normal if you don't see this immediately. Just wait for a few minutes.

2. Server blocks: server blocks allow your NGINX server to serve more than one site and configure each site with their own set of options. In this case, "site" is the Team Password Manager installation, so we'll configure one server block to serve tpm.mycompany.com. An important option we'll set up is how PHP communicates with NGINX using FPM. First we'll do the configuration for http://tpm.mycompany.com and later we'll configure https://tpm.mycompany.com with a commercial SSL certificate. Please follow these steps (remember always to change tpm.mycompany.com to your own subdomain):

2.1 Create a new configuration file for the Team Password Manager site in NGINX's sites-available folder:

$ sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/tpm.mycompany.com

2.2 Edit this tpm.mycompany.com configuration file to look like this:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name tpm.mycompany.com;
    root /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html;

    access_log /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/logs/access.log;
    error_log /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/logs/error.log error;

    index index.html index.htm index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
     }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

Some explanations:

  • server_name specifies the domain NGINX is serving in this block. Enter you subdomain here.
  • /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html is where we'll put the Team Password Manager software files. We'll do this later on this tutorial. The root directive is used to tell the web server that when a request is made to tpm.mycompany.com it should serve the files on /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html.
  • The error_log and access_log directives create specific logs for our installation, which are stored in /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/logs/. Note that these logs are web server logs, not the internal log of Team Password Manager (which can be found in the top menu of the software, "Log" option).
  • location ~ \.php$: this location block connects NGINX with PHP using FPM.

2.3 Create the installation folders:

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/{public_html,logs}

public_html is currently owned by root, but it's better if you assign ownership to the user you're using to setup all of this or the one who's going to maintain it ($USER, which is the current user, or the username you want):

$ sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html

Set appropriate permissions for public_html:

$ sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html

The final result should be similar to this:

myuser@myhostname:/var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com$ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root   root   4096 Oct 24 10:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root   root   4096 Oct 24 10:43 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root   root   4096 Oct 24 10:43 logs
drwxr-xr-x 2 myuser myuser 4096 Oct 24 10:43 public_html

2.4 Activate the site by linking to the configuration file for our site from NGINX's sites-enabled folder:

$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/tpm.mycompany.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

2.5 Disable the default configuration file to minimize security risks by unlinking it from the sites-enabled folder:

$ sudo unlink /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

2.6 Test the configuration:

$ sudo nginx -t

If the configuration is correct, you should see a message like this one:

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

2.7 Reload Nginx to apply the changes:

$ sudo systemctl reload nginx

To test, enter http://tpm.mycompany.com/ in your browser and you should see this forbidden message as we haven't yet put any files in the public_html folder:

Forbidden message

Also, after accessing it, check the logs folder and you'll see the two log files: access.log and error.log.

To check that PHP is correctly installed and communicating with NGINX, do this:

1. Restart FPM to apply the changes we made in php.ini earlier:

$ sudo systemctl restart php8.2-fpm

2. Create a file called phpinfo.php in /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html with the following content:

<?php phpinfo();

3. Open this file with the browser pointing at your site: http://tpm.mycompany.com/phpinfo.php

You should see the phpinfo page with all the PHP settings. You can send this to PDF to keep it for your records. Afterwards, delete the phpinfo.php file.

PHPinfo page

HTTPS and installing an SSL Certificate from a Commercial Certificate Authority

Up to this point we've configured the server to accept requests to http://tpm.mycompany.com.

In this section we'll:

  • Install a commercial SSL certificate to avoid browser warnings about unsafe connections.
  • Configure the web server to accept requests to https://tpm.mycompany.com (note the "s" in https), so that the communication between the client's browser and the server is encrypted.

Let's get to it. We'll first begin by changing to root user and updating the system:

$ su - root (and enter the root password)

# apt update && apt upgrade

To get a commercial SSL certificate we'll need a private key and a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) file. You can create them using the following commands:

Create a folder where to store the certificate files and go to that folder:

# mkdir /root/certs/ && cd /root/certs/

Execute openssl to create the private key and CSR (remember to use your own subdomain instead of tpm.mycompany.com):

# openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout tpm.mycompany.com.key -out tpm.mycompany.com.csr

When you execute this you'll be required to enter some information that will be integrated into your certificate request. It's specially important that you correctly enter the "Common name", which is the URL you want to use to access your installation of Team Password Manager. In this case we've used tpm.mycompany.com because we'll use https://tpm.mycompany.com to access our Team Password Manager installation (marked in red):

Generating a RSA private key
.....................+++++
......+++++
writing new private key to 'tpm.mycompany.com.key'
-----
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:ES
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:Barcelona
Locality Name (eg, city) []:My city
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:My company
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Security
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:tpm.mycompany.com
Email Address []:info@mycompany.com

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

The outcome of executing openssl are two files: tpm.mycompany.com.key and tpm.mycompany.com.csr.

tpm.mycompany.com.key is the private key, and you should protect it and not disclose it to anyone. tpm.mycompany.com.csr is the CSR file. You'll be required to copy and paste its contents into the online enrollment form when requesting the certificate.

You should now purchase the certificate from a Commercial Authority (CA). We've used Namecheap (PositiveSSL certificate) but you can use any CA that you like. The CA will ask you to copy the information in the CSR file (everything from -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST to END CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----) and paste it on the indicated form. You can see the contents of the CSR file with this command: # cat tpm.mycompany.com.csr. You'll also need to validate your domain, the CA will provide various methods for doing so.

The CA will provide you with two files: tpm_mycompany_com.crt and tpm_mycompany_com.ca-bundle. Once you have them continue with the following steps:

Copy the files to the appropriate folders:

# cp tpm_mycompany_com.crt /etc/ssl/certs/
# cp tpm_mycompany_com.ca-bundle /etc/ssl/certs/

# cp tpm.mycompany.com.key /etc/ssl/private/
# cp tpm.mycompany.com.csr /etc/ssl/private/

Delete them from the /root/cert folder:

# rm /root/cert/tpm*

Note: we advise you to store all the certificate files outside the server, in a backup location.

The certificate files should be owned by root and protected by a permission setting of 600:

# chown -R root. /etc/ssl/private/tpm*
# chown -R root. /etc/ssl/certs/tpm*

# chmod -R 0600 /etc/ssl/private/tpm*
# chmod -R 0600 /etc/ssl/certs/tpm*

So the result of installing the certificate files should be something like this:

# ls -la /etc/ssl/certs/tpm*
-rw------- 1 root root 4135 Oct 24 12:14 /etc/ssl/certs/tpm_mycompany_com.ca-bundle
-rw------- 1 root root 2537 Oct 24 12:14 /etc/ssl/certs/tpm_mycompany_com.crt

# ls -la /etc/ssl/private/tpm*
-rw------- 1 root root 1765 Oct 24 12:15 /etc/ssl/private/tpm.mycompany.com.csr
-rw------- 1 root root 3272 Oct 24 12:14 /etc/ssl/private/tpm.mycompany.com.key

Let's now tackle the NGINX configuration part. To do it, edit our site configuration file (/etc/nginx/sites-available/tpm.mycompany.com) to include the following changes:

• Listen to port 443 (ssl) instead of port 80.

• ssl directives for the certificate files:

ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/tpm_mycompany_com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/tpm.mycompany.com.key;

• Redirect http to https automatically. This is done using a new server block inside the file that listens to port 80 and redirects to the https address of the site, like this:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name tpm.mycompany.com;
    return 301 https://tpm.mycompany.com$request_uri;
}

The resulting configuration file should look like this (the parts in red are the ones we've just changed or added):

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name tpm.mycompany.com;
    return 301 https://tpm.mycompany.com$request_uri;
}
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name tpm.mycompany.com;
    root /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html;

    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/tpm_mycompany_com.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/tpm.mycompany.com.key;

    access_log /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/logs/access.log;
    error_log /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/logs/error.log error;

    index index.html index.htm index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
     }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

Reload NGINX for the changes to take effect:

# nginx -s reload

You should also exit to get out of root return to the normal user.

You can now test the requests: if you go to http://tpm.mycompany.com, you should be redirected to https://tpm.mycompany.com, and see the same forbidden message as before (as we still haven't installed the software files). This time, though, you can see that the browser shows you the secure connection "lock" icon and if you click on it you'll find information about the certificate:

Secure connection

SourceGuardian Loader installation

Team Password Manager is a PHP web application encoded and secured using an encoder (SourceGuardian) and a loader is required to execute it. You need at least version 14.0.3 of the SourceGuardian Loader.

To install the Sourceguardian Loader follow these steps:

Go to https://www.sourceguardian.com/loaders.html and download the Linux x86_64 zip package. You should get the following file: loaders.linux-x86_64.zip.

Unzip it (it will create the "loaders.linux-x86_64" folder) and copy (or upload) the ixed.8.2.lin file into the following folder on your server: /usr/lib/php/20220829.

Edit the php.ini file in /etc/php/8.2/fpm/php.ini and put this line just below [PHP]:

extension=ixed.8.2.lin

Restart FPM (Note: we're not restarting NGINX. When we make changes to PHP configuration and we're using FPM to communicate PHP with the web server, we restart FPM instead of the web server):

$ sudo systemctl restart php8.2-fpm

To test: create a file called phpinfo.php in /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html with this content:

<?php phpinfo();

Open this file with the browser: https://tpm.mycompany.com/phpinfo.php

Check the "Sourceguardian" section, like in this image (note that for this tutorial the Loader version should be 14+):

SourceGuardian Loader section

Delete the phpinfo.php file.


Team Password Manager database and user

In this section we're going to create the database that will store the Team Password Manager information and a user to access this database from the software. We're going to use these values, we advise you use your own:

Database: tpm_database
User: tpm_user
Password: tpmPass%2023

Follow these steps to create the database and user:

1. Enter the mysql prompt. Since we're using sudo, we'll log in with the mysql root user:

$ sudo mysql

2. Type the following command at the mysql prompt to create the database:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE `tpm_database` CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

3. Type the following command at the mysql prompt to create the user:

mysql> CREATE USER 'tpm_user'@'%' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'tpmPass%2023';

Note the use of mysql_native_password authentication method, due to PHP not supporting MySQL 8 default authentication method (caching_sha2_authentication).

3. Type the following commands at the mysql prompt to grant all the privileges to the user on the database:

mysql> GRANT ALL ON tpm_database.* TO 'tpm_user'@'%';

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Type exit at the mysql prompt to exit mysql and return to the normal linux prompt.


Team Password Manager files

Download the Team Password Manager software files from https://teampasswordmanager.com/download/, unzip the zip file and upload all the files and folders to /var/www/html/tpm.mycompany.com/public_html.

Let's now verfiy permissions. We're going to assign the following permissions to Team Password Manager files and folders:

• User = the user you're using to create the installation ($USER).

• Group = the one used by NGINX (www-data).

$ sudo chown -R $USER:www-data *

• Permissions: full to the user and group and none to the others (770):

$ chmod -R 770 *

You should have something like this when done (myuser is the user you're using to create the installation; also note that at the time of writing this tutorial the version of Team Password Manager used is 10.138.240, so you might have different file sizes):

$ ls -la
drwxr-xr-x  7 myuser myuser    4096 Oct 24 18:18 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 root   root      4096 Oct 24 17:24 ..
-rwxrwx---  1 myuser www-data  1886 Oct 24 17:49 config.php
drwxrwx---  3 myuser www-data  4096 Oct 24 17:48 css
-rwxrwx---  1 myuser www-data  9127 Oct 24 17:48 eula.txt
-rwxrwx---  1 myuser www-data   610 Oct 24 17:48 folder.php
drwxrwx---  2 myuser www-data  4096 Oct 24 17:48 import
-rwxrwx---  1 myuser www-data 21484 Oct 24 17:48 index.php
-rwxrwx---  1 myuser www-data 10157 Oct 24 17:48 install.txt
-rwxrwx---  1 myuser www-data    25 Oct 24 17:48 robots.txt
drwxrwx---  8 myuser www-data  4096 Oct 24 17:48 system
-rwxrwx---  1 myuser www-data  5063 Oct 24 17:48 upgrade.txt
drwxrwx---  2 myuser www-data  4096 Oct 24 17:48 uploads
drwxrwx--- 17 myuser www-data  4096 Oct 24 17:48 wmm

Team Password Manager configuration file (config.php)

Edit the config.php file and enter the database, user and password configured in the database step:

// MySQL Database server
define('CONFIG_HOSTNAME', 'localhost');

// User that accesses the database server, that should have all privileges on the database CONFIG_DATABASE
define('CONFIG_USERNAME', 'tpm_user');

// User password
define('CONFIG_PASSWORD', 'tpmPass%2023');

// Database for Team Password Manager. You must manually create it before installing Team Password Manager
define('CONFIG_DATABASE', 'tpm_database');

Team Password Manager installation script

Open your browser and enter this in the address bar:

https://tpm.mycompany.com/index.php/install

You should see the Team Password Manager installation screen:

Team Password Manager installation screen

Just enter the values and complete the installation.

If everything went well Team Password Manager is now installed. Congratulations!!

Document changelog

Oct 24, 2023: Document created, replacing the Ubuntu 20.04 one
Questions or Problems? Please contact our support department