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“.

PointSMS Welcome Screen
PointSMS Welcome Screen
PointSMS Web Portal
PointSMS Web Portal

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

Register with GloboSMS
Register with GloboSMS

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

PointSMS Gateway Add
PointSMS Gateway Add

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.

PointSMS Compose SMS
PointSMS Compose SMS

Reference Links

  1. PointSMS
  2. GloboSMS.com
Ravi Saive
I am an experienced GNU/Linux expert and a full-stack software developer with over a decade in the field of Linux and Open Source technologies

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31 thoughts on “Setup and Run Your Own Online SMS Portal With PointSMS on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora”

  1. Mr.Ravi,
    Thanks for your support in the blog,..I was looking for the download files of it,Im in damn need of it..can you please try to send me the files if you have for it…

    thank you very much in advance.

    Reply
  2. how to set ip in pointsms,
    so I can still access my point zpanel and my sms web interface
    i need your help

    thanks for reply

    Reply
  3. i’m installed Zpanel in my localhost
    before zpanel install,i can access my pointsms web interface,
    but after install zpanel, i can’t access it

    how to fix it

    Reply
    • Your Zpanel installation overwritten all your system files, because zpanel comes with own web server and that might overwritten your existing web server files and in result you lost the pointsms setup. To fix pointsms portal you need setup again.

      Reply
  4. after login,i see this

    blank page

    Not Found

    The requested URL /compose was not found on this server.
    Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Server at localhost.localdomain Port 80

    Reply
      • Followed the procedure, didn’t find any error or warning during performing steps, but couldn’t find the login screen after typin ip address in the browser.

        Any other change/modify in the config files?

        Reply
        • Did you placed the files under your web root directory and added proper MySQL settings? What you seeing in the browser?

          Reply

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