From the starting point when you only have a fresh OS installed to the finish where you can create a new thread, post images, use captcha and so on. And it actually works.

The process of configuring and installing this engine is known as a Nightmare Mode quest for someone not very familar with all this server and programming-thech-IT things. And it's at least very time-consuming process for someone who have an idea of what back-end is and how it works.

I'm trying to make it easier for everyone.

INSTALLING OS

It is recommended to use some staging environment to tweak your engine and see if it works and then take it to production.

I'm using Debian 10 GNU/Linux distro on VirtualBox. It works perfectly fine.

If you're not sure which file you need to download to get the OS from the official website you can try this one: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-10.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso

After you have installed it you'll need to also enable network access to you virtual instance from the host machine. You can find lots of guides on the Internet. Example: https://2buntu.com/articles/1513/accessing-your-virtualbox-guest-from-your-host-os

Then make sure that you have sudo access (and if you have sudo package at all).

Get sudo:
$ su
password:
# apt update && apt install sudo

Then add your user to sudo group
# cd /usr/sbin
# ./usermod -a -G sudo <username>

Then logout and login again (only then changes would take effect)
# exit
$ exit
debian login:
Password:
$

Check if your user is in sudoers group (output should include your username)
$ getent group sudo

Now you can install Apache server (it is already installed if you have installed your OS with the right options)
$ sudo apt install apache2

You can check it's status by
$ sudo systemctl status apache2
or by just requesting the default page using some client like curl and see if it throws raw HTML at you in response
$ sudo apt install curl && curl localhost:80

Then check if you can access it form your host system (find guests IP by running "$ ip address" command inside of it). And make sure that your network config file is configured properly. As virtual box won't change it if you have added guest's netwrok settings after you have installed the OS. Check the config located at /etc/network/interfaces edit it if needed and raise interfaces again (or just reboot).

You probably can not access it at this point as by default the firewall will not allow any connections at all.
You need to allow TCP protocol port 80
$ sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Now you should be able to type your guest's IP address in your host's browser's address bar and hopefully navigate to the default Apache page. If you can't then you missed something or did something wrong. Try to fix it.

INSTALLING THE ENGINE

Install git
$ sudo apt install git
Clone the repo (somewhere inside of the /home/<username>/ directory so you don't need the root access rights to edit that files because you might want to tweak it, name your boards and only install it afterwards)
$ git clone https://github.com/some1suspicious/wakaba-original.git
Move this folder to /var/www/html/
$ sudo mv wakaba-original /var/www/html/<your board name>

This way you can quickly create as many boards as you need. And if you're following this guide while doing everything on a real server with Internet access then CONGRATULATIONS now everyone is able to view every file you have there including your configs with passwords. So don't do this step before the next one. Never. You need to at least turn off your apache server first ($ sudo service apache2 stop ). But it's fine if you're on virtual machine.

Configure your Apache server

1. Timeout

Default timeout is 300 seconds. This might to be too long and makes your server a nice target for a "low and slow" attacks (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/ddos-low-and-slow-attack/).
Make it 60 instead of 300. This means that your users won't be able to upload or receive something for more than 60 seconds.

2. CGI execution, .htaccess
To allow the CGI execution (CGI is an interface for Apache-Perl communication) and make your rules in .htaccess files work you need to find <Directory /var/www/> tag and edit it so it looks like this:
# ------------------------------------------------
<Directory /var/www/>

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Options +ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
    Require all granted

</Directory>
# ------------------------------------------------

3. Additional security tweaks
You might want to place this right before the last line of the config that says something about vim.

# ------- Server security config ---------------
# Prevent coockies stealing
TraceEnable off
# Disable showing Apache version in headers
ServerSignature Off
ServerTokens Major
# Prevent from obtaining inode number, multipart MIME boundary, and child process through Etag header
FileETag None
# Set cookie with HttpOnly and Secure flag (prevent possible CSS, stealing sessions and coockies)
Header edit Set-Cookie ^(.*)$ $1;HttpOnly;Secure
#CORS (forbid framing)
Header always append X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN
# X-XSS protection
Header set X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block"
# Disable HTTP 1.0 (allow only 1.1)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !HTTP/1.1$
RewriteRule .* - [F]
# ------------------------------------------------
But this is not the best place to put it. We are doing this for simplicity but logically it is better to put this parts in /etc/apache2/conf-available/security.conf and then enable them. Restart apache2 service after editing it's configuration files ($ sudo service apache2 restart ).

4. Apache modules
There are some modules that can extend the apache's core functions with additional features.
You can enable them by the following command
$ sudo a2enmod <modname_without_extension>
And aside from the default ones, you will probably need the following modules:
cgid (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_cgid.html)
headers (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_headers.html)
rewrite (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_rewrite.html)
ssl (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_ssl.html)
Restart the apache2 service after enabling them.

5. Sites configuration
There is a folder (/etc/apache2/sites-available ) that contain configuration for your websites. You can host multiple sites but for simplicity we will leave it unchanged. But you can specify ServerName and ServerAdmin (email) if you want. Note: if you want to host multiple sites then you might need to change that main config files because we have configured it only for one website and you might need more diverse options for each website.

6. Actual website's directory
You can place robots.txt files here (/var/www/html/) and some .htaccess files for security reasons (remember that it is always better to place rules as high in hierarchy (main apache.conf > virtual host > .htaccess) as possible while it's reasonable because it's more secure than using .htaccess files for everything).

7. htaccess
If you are using .htaccess from wakaba-reddy repo then it is probably configured already. But keep in mind that you might need to edit it after you rename/move/add some files or directories while doing some changes to the engine.

8. chmod
Script files should be executable. You can make them so with this command:
$ cmod 755 <filename>
Some direcotories (including the website's root directory) should be writable so Perl scripts can write files to them. Make directories writable with this command:
$ chmod 777 <filename>

Provide database
Wakaba supports MySQL and SQLite databases. In this tutorial we'll use MariaDB (it is MySQL's fork).
$ sudo apt install mariadb-server
And check status, it should be running
$ sudo systemctl status mariadb

Now you should login as root and create a new user and then grant him all priviliges.
$ sudo mariadb
> CREATE DATABASE <my_database_name> CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
> CREATE USER '<my_user_name>'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<my_password>';
> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON <my_database_name>.* TO '<my_user_name>'@'localhost';
> exit

Check if you actually can login and create a database:
$ mariadb --user=<my_user_name> -p
password:
> use <my_database_name>;
> CREATE TABLE test_table (tst INT);
> SELECT * FROM test_table;
If that doesn't produce any errors then you're good to go.

Go ahead and hit http://<your_domain_or_local_ip>/<board_name>/wakaba.pl
It should create the tables in the database and the first page with the interface. If something gone wrong then it's probably your fault. Shame on you. Or maybe you've just forgotten to edit the config.pl file. Tweak it according to your preferences. And also install imagemagick if you will use it (see the actual congif.pl ).