In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure WordPress on Ubuntu 16.04. 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 content management systems on a Ubuntu 16.04 server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04.
- 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 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 Ubuntu 16.04
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:
apt-get install php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-xmlrpc php7.0-gd
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 4.5.1:
wget http://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 www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/
We need to create the upload directory manually:
mkdir -p /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
Allow the Apache webserver to write to the uploads directory. Do this by assigning group ownership of this directory to your web server which will allow Apache to create files and directories. Issue the following command:
chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
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 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 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 web server 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:
sudo a2enmod rewrite 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:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 7. Accessing WordPress.
WordPress will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com 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 Ubuntu 16.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WordPress website.
