Setting up and installing WordPress is pretty straight forward. That’s not to say it’s not going to take a little work to go from 0 to 60 on a base Linux installation. But I’ll lay the work out for you so as not to be that tricky. Everything we’ll be doing will require elevated privileges, so sudo in front of each command or sudo bash before you get going.
First up, install Apache, as you’ll need a web server. I think the base apache2 config is pretty straight forward out-of-the-box:
apt-get install apache2
During installation you will be asked to type y to continue. Do that and it will finish with no major issues. Next up, install MySQL, php5, php5-mysql and phpmyadmin. We can use apt-get to knock all this out at once:
apt-get install mysql-server-5.1 php5 php5-mysql phpmyadmin
Again, you will be asked to choose whether to proceed, type y and hit enter. The next few steps will change according to versions, but for now, you’ll then be asked for a password for the MySQL root user. Provide that password and then tab to the OK button. You’ll then be asked to select which web server you are using. Assuming you did the apache2 install previously, choose Apache and then tab to the OK dialog. Then you will be asked to provide the MySQL password. This will be the password you typed earlier.
You’ll then be prompted for a phpmyadmin password, which will be a password to access phpmyadmin’s web interface. Once the installation is done, you should have a fully functional LAMP environment. I like to reboot and check syslog afterwards just to make sure that everything is in working order and not reporting any major malfunctions.
Next up, we will need to create the MySQL user and database that WordPress will use. To do so, log into phpmyadmin using a URL that begins with http:// followed by the address of your server and finally the /phpmyadmin. For example, if your server is at 192.168.210.200 then the address would be http://192.168.210.200/phpmyadmin. You will be asked to authenticate, and here you will want to use the password you provided during the phpmyadmin package installation. Once you have authenticated, click on the Privileges tab and then click on the Add a new user button.
You will then be asked to provide a username and password for the user you are creating, define what addresses that user can log in from (if you have multiple front-end servers you probably aren’t using this post to install WordPress so you might as well limit it to localhost) and most importantly you have a radio button for “Create database with same name and grant all privileges”. If you use this option then both the user and the database will be created in one step, making life pretty easy. I used wordpress as my username in the example.
Once you have all the services installed and the MySQL user and database setup, then you’re ready to install WordPress. I like to cd into /var/www and then wget the latest.zip, which always has the latest version of WordPress:
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
Then you want to unzip that (the unzip command is built into Ubuntu 10):
unzip latest.zip
This will extract the wordpress folder into /var/www. Then make sure your admin user has permission (mine is oddly enough called cedge):
chown -R cedge:users wordpress
Now cd into the wordpress directory:
cd wordpress
Make a copy of the main configuration template called wp-config.php:
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
And then let’s edit that new file (vi, nano, tapping directly into the Matrix, or whatever you like), looking for DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_HOST. In these respective fields, put the name of the database (wordpress in this example), the username for administrative rights to the database (wordpress again in this example), the password for the database (whatever you provided in phpmyadmin’s web interface for your new user and the IP or hostname of the database server (let’s assume 127.0.0.1 if the database and web servers are the same).
Scroll down a little further until you see the Authentication Unique Keys: AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY and NONCE_KEY. You’ll want to visit the WordPress secret key generator at https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt to get your keys. Then simply cut/copy/paste the whole section, commenting out the existing lines or paste the contents of each line over the line it is replacing. Once that is done save your changes to the file and exit your text editor. Now visit the address of the site followed by WordPress (ie – https://krypted.com//wordpress). You’ll then be able to setup WordPress for the first time.
At the first login, you will see a screen prompting you to define a title for the site (Your domain name is a pretty traditional title to use), the username you want to use to administer the site (ie – admin), the password (ie – according to the movie Hackers, god) and and administrative email address. Here, you can also choose whether you want the site to be crawled by search engines. Once you’re happy with your settings, click on the Install WordPress button down at the bottom of the page.
Now you should be able to see your first post, create posts and use WordPress. That should have been pretty painless. If it were any more painless, then I fear the dribble that people would post… Anyway, if you want the webroot (www.krypted.com instead of https://krypted.com//wordpress) to be WordPress, then you will also want to change the DocumentRoot setting in /var/www to point to the /var/www/wordpress folder in the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default file (or whichever site it is if you have multiple ones).
