If you just installed Mautic in 2020, you might have noticed the Maxmind IP lookup doesn’t seem to work anymore. That’s because Maxmind has changed the method to obtain the latest updated databases from them.
The difference is simple, now you need to provide your credentials, but it completely changes the process to update your IP database.

In this post you’ll find 5 simple steps to fix the Maxmind Geolite2 and GeoIP issue in under 10 minutes, so you can make your Mautic installation compliant with the new process and automate obtaining the Geolite2 database for your Mautic installation.

This issue is not going to bring your server down or cause any big problems, however, it affects every single Mautic installation out there, so it really is a good idea to fix it ASAP.

Flawless Mautic upgrades every time! Not an impossible dream, just a simple step by step guide…
You might be already suffering the consequences of an incomplete Mautic update without knowing about it!
Just make sure you don’t click that button yet!!! There’s a better way…

UPDATED on October 14, 2019, for Mautic 2.15.3
With this Mautic tutorial, you will learn how to complete the Mautic 2.15.3 installation on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with PHP 7.2 on top of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in just about 7 minutes.

If you are a total newbie to the Linux command line, this tutorial was made specifically for you, it’s the best way to get started as I carefully designed it to have the fewer amount of commands possible, so it’s easier to understand and the probability of anything going sideways is minimal. It’s designed to give you a quick success using the command line so you can have an easy victory and gain the confidence to later advance towards more complex, more secure and better-optimized setups.

On the other hand, if you are more experienced with Linux, and don’t mind some extra complexity, this might be a better tutorial for you: Securing your Mautic Installation

There are 3 steps:

1. Install Mautic and required packages
2. Install the Mautic cron jobs.
3. Run the Mautic Configuration Wizard.

Cron jobs are supposed to be the smartest and simplest way to automate things on a Linux server, and they are to some extent. However, its design, deeply rooted in the darkest corners of the Linux kernel, designed by the deep minds that created Linux itself, doesn’t always present itself as obvious to us marketers (or to any other kind of Linux Dummies), that’s probably why soooo many people have issues with cron jobs. Yes, maybe this is something that should be solved within the Mautic interface, maybe someday… in the meantime, let’s try to tackle this problem down, in a way even a marketer can do it 🙂

Mautic will run on any server that supports PHP and a MySQL compatible database, which is little short of saying it will run anywhere, you could run it on Linux, Windows, you could run it on your phone, what the heck! you could probably run it on your smart coffee maker!

But should you? Of course not, your coffee maker runs java! hehehe.

Now seriously, which is the best platform to run Mautic? As always, it depends, so I will try to give you enough pointers for you to choose the best option for your own situation.

UPDATED on October 14, 2019, for Mautic 2.15.3

This is part 2 of the Mautic installation tutorial, in part 2 we will secure our server in order to make it production ready. 

This is a slightly more advanced installation process allowing for a more secure install of Mautic 2.15.3 on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with PHP 7.2 on top of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. This tutorial should take you between 10 and 20 minutes depending on your level of expertise with Mautic and Linux.

There’s much more to making backups than just copying files, as you probably know, you need a backup strategy. In this post, I’m not going to enter in detail on the strategic part. Anyway, I’m going to abide by the most basic and indispensable elements of a backup strategy, that is so, if you ever need your data, you have a certain guarantee that your data will remain available to you when most needed.

I’m going to start with a little bit of theory, I know it’s boring, but it will let you understand what you’re doing in the second part when we start using the console and giving instructions to the server.

There are many Mautic cron jobs you can use in your Mautic installation, but Mautic can get resource hungry over time, so you don’t really want to run them all, in fact, that would be a great mistake, you only have to add the cron jobs that you actually need in your own setup, based on your own Mautic installation and the Mautic features you’re currently using.

This is a guide to help you both, first discover and then choose the right Mautic cron jobs you want to deploy in order to have a perfectly smooth Mautic installation on your server. 

Installing Mautic plugins or Mautic Mixins (as only God knows why they are officially named now) is really simple… most of the time…
But there’s always some obscure unofficial plugin that you really need so badly, and those always have little or no instructions and hence they refuse to install.

Don’t worry, it really is very simple, if you know a couple of tricks… Let’s start with the basics:

Yeah I know, this is pretty trivial, but I had made some snapshots of the process and thought, why not? Maybe someone gets stuck in one of the steps, like the database (I did the first time I installed Mautic) So here it is…

OK so after you complete the mautic installation, you have to navigate to your server or VPS, either by using the server’s IP or, if you have set up your DNS, using the domain name. After you do, and if everything went fine you will be presented with the following screens:

Troubleshooting Mautic is not usually simple, but it helps a lot if you know what to look for.
These 4 steps will get you there most of the time:  

1) Check ALL your logs.
2) Check the Mautic output on your browser.
3) Search the Internet, especially Github.
4) Report your findings.