How To Install WordPress on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure WordPress on Debian 9. For those of you who didn’t know, WordPress is the most popular open-source blogging and CMS platform worldwide, powering a quarter of all websites on the Internet today. It is based on PHP and MySQL and packs a ton of features that can be extended with free and premium plugins and themes. WordPress is the simplest way to create your website or blog.

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 the step-by-step installation of WordPress on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install WordPress on Debian 9 Stretch

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.

A Debian 9 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing WordPress.

The first thing to do is to go to WordPress’s download page and download the latest stable version of WordPress, At the moment of writing this article it is version 4.9.8:

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 folder permissions:

chown www-data:www-data -R /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 the 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:

CREATE DATABASE wordpress character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on wordpress.* to 'wpuser'@'localhost' identified by 'your_password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
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 users:

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. Accessing WordPress.

WordPress will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://your-server-ip/ and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed WordPress. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing WordPress CMS (Content Management Systems) on your Debian 9 Stretch system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WordPress website.

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