How To Install WordPress on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WordPress on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and is mostly used to create free websites or build personal blogs. 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 Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A Ubuntu 20.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Next, install other required PHP modules if not already installed:

sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-fpm php-json php-pdo php-mysql php-zip php-gd php-mbstring php-curl php-xml php-pear php-bcmath

Step 3. Installing WordPress on Ubuntu 20.04.

Download the latest version WordPress archive from the WordPress downloads page:

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/

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_db;
CREATE USER wordpress_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress_db.* TO wordpress_user@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Step 5. Configure WordPress on Ubuntu 20.04.

WordPress comes with a sample configuration, wp-config-sample.php. Rename the sample configuration file:

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

Replace the DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD with the values you set while creating the MySQL database for WordPress:

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress_db');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress_user');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'your-strong-password');

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

Step 6. Configuring Apache web server for WordPress.

Create an Apache virtual host configuration for your WordPress site. 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

Step 7. Configuring UFW Firewall.

If UFW is running, open port 80/TCP to allow external access:

ufw allow 80/tcp

Step 8. Accessing WordPress.

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 WordPress CMS (Content Management Systems) on your Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WordPress website.