In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WordPress on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, WordPress is a free and open-source CMS based on the PHP programming language, with MySQL or MariaDB being used for the backend where the data is stored. WordPress provides a lot of features and these features can also be extended by using a wide variety of available plugins for it
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of WordPress on a CentOS 8.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install WordPress on CentOS 8
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
sudo dnf clean all sudo dnf update
Step 2. Installing LAMP Stack.
If you don’t have a LAMP stack already installed on your server, you can follow our guide here.
Step 3. Installing WordPress on CentOS 8.
The latest release of WordPress can be downloaded from their official website. At the moment of writing this article it is version 5.5.1:
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
Unpack the WordPress archive to the document root directory on your server:
unzip -q latest.zip -d /var/www/html/ cd wordpress cp -a * ..
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for WordPress.
By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. You should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB.
mysql_secure_installation
Configure it like this:
- Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for WordPress. Run the following command:
mysql -u root -p
This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for WordPress installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE wordpress; MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'wpuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Your-Passwd'; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser'@'localhost'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES MariaDB [(none)]> exit
Step 5. Configuring WordPress
In this step we will configure the main configuration file of WordPress, where we need to configure its basic parameters so that it can be connected with the database and user:
mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
Now open it using any of your favorite editors, to make any changes in the WordPress configuration file:
nano wp-config.php
Here are the values that we need to update according to our previous database and user’s setup:
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wpuser');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'your_password');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
Step 6. Configuring Apache for WordPress.
We will create an Apache virtual host for your WordPress website. First, create ‘/etc/apache/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:
nano /etc/apache/conf.d/vhosts.conf IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf
Next, create the virtual host:
mkdir /etc/apache/vhosts.d/ nano /etc/apache/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/" ServerName yourdomain.com ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log" CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined <Directory "/var/www/html/"> DirectoryIndex index.html index.php Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> </VirtualHost>
Save and close the file. Restart the Apache service for the changes to take effect:
systemctl restart httpd.service systemctl enable httpd.service
Step 7. Installing SSL for Apache on CentOS 8.
Run these commands on the command line on the machine to install Certbot:
wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto sudo mv certbot-auto /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto sudo chown root /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto
Then, run this command to get a certificate and have Certbot edit your Apache configuration automatically:
sudo /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto --apache
Step 8. Configure Firewall
Now, we will let HTTP and HTTPS ports through our firewall (on the permanent, zone, and add values there are two minuses before them):
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https sudo firewall-cmd --reload
Step 9. Accessing the WordPress Web Interface.
Once all steps above are done, the installation from the command line is completed. Open your favorite browser and navigate to https://your-domain.com or https://server-ip-address/ and complete the required steps to finish the installation.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed WordPress. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing WordPress CMS (Content Management Systems) on your CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WordPress website.
