Setup and Run Your Own Online SMS Portal With PointSMS on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

PointSMS is an free open source online sms application was written in PHP language, that enables you to setup your own online sms portal to send single or high volume of SMS messages through GloboSMS gateway and enables you to touch with your customers, employees and partners around the globe.

The PointSMS aims to provides a easy to use friendly web interface to manage (add, delete, modify and disable ) all your user accounts, sending invoices and many other features.

This article will show you how you can install and setup an online SMS web site portal using “PointSMS” in RHEL, CentOS, Fedora systems.

PointSMS Features

Following are some key features of PointSMS portal.

1. Easy to install and use.
2. Support for UTF-8 with (Greek language supported).
3. Easy to manage (add,delete,modify,disable) all your clients accounts from panel.
4. SMS Limits and Credits.
5. Invoice System to send invoices via email to your clients.
6. Provides a complete transaction log.
7. Online software updates.
8. Support for incoming messages using kannel as back-end.
9. Flash player support for publishing sms in tv.
10. XML output for incoming sms.

Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP

To install “PointSMS” portal, you must have Apache, MySQL, PHP and Wget packages installed on your system. So, install them using the following yum command. Copy and Paste the whole command in a terminal.

# yum -y install httpd httpd-devel mysql mysql-server php-mysql php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-mbstring php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc wget

Once you’ve installed all the above packages, then create a system start-up links for Apache and MySQL. So, whenever a system boots, these services start automatically.

# chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on 
# chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on

Type the following commands to start the both services as shown below.

# /etc/init.d/httpd start
# /etc/init.d/mysqld start

Installing PointSMS Portal

Go to the Apache website root directory (i.e. /var/www/html) and download the “PointSMS” package using wget command. Once downloaded extract the files with the help of tar command.

# cd /var/www/html
# wget http://www.pointsms.org/downloads/pointsms_1.0.1_beta.tar 
# tar -xvf pointsms_1.0.1_beta.tar

Now we need to create a “pointsms” database. So, connect to your MySQL server and create the database by running the following commands.

# mysql -u root -p
# create database pointsms;
# exit;

Next, import the “pointsms.sql” file to the newly created “pointsms” database.

# cd /var/www/html
# mysql -u root -p pointsms < DB/pointsms.sql

Open the following file with your choice of editor and change the database settings as shown below.

# vi includes/config.php

//Database Settings
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass = 'password';
$dbname = 'pointsms';

Setup a cronjob for “cron.php” to run every minute and add the correct installation path.

# crontab -e

*/1 * * * * php /var/www/html/cron.php

Next, rename htaccess to .htaccess.

# mv htaccess .htaccess

Now, we need to enable mod_rewrite module in Apache. So, open the configuration file.

# vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

And Change “AllowOverride None“.

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
</Directory>

To “AllowOverride All“.

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Run the following command to restart the Apache, to reflect new changes.

# service httpd restart

Open your favorite browser and point to your server’s IP address, you will see the following screen. Enter default username “admin” and password as “admin“.

To start sending SMS, you must have a account with globosms.com. Go and register a account.

Once you’ve got the login details. Go to PointSMS in admin –> Gateway section, enter details.

To compose a sms. Go to SMS –> Compose SMS and enter the details of the recipients as shown below. Right now you can able to send single sms. To send more sms, you must have “Credits” in your Account.

Reference Links

1. PointSMS
2. GloboSMS.com