How To Install WordPress on Linux Mint 19

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WordPress on Linux Mint 19. For those of you who didn’t know, WordPress is an online, open-source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.

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 Linux Mint 19 (Tricia) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 19 (Tricia).
• 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 Linux Mint 19

Step 1. Before running the tutorial below, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update

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

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

Step 3. Installing WordPress on Linux Mint 19.

Go to the WordPress website to download the source code:

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

We will extract 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 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 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:

create database wordpress;
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 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

// ** 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_strong_password');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Step 6. Configuring Apache for WordPress.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘wordpress.conf’ on your virtual server:

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/wordpress.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo a2ensite wordpress.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite 
sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 7. Configure Firewall

After Configuring Apache it is necessary to modify UFW firewall rules to open HTTP and HTTPS ports. Run the following command:

sudo ufw allow 'Apache Full'

Step 8. Accessing a WordPress Site.

WordPress will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com or http://your-server-ip/ and complete the required steps to finish the installation.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed WordPress. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of WordPress on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WordPress website.