How To Install WordPress on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure WordPress on CentOS 7. 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 CentOS 7 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
• 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 CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules for WordPress:

yum install php-gd php-xml php-xmlrpc

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 4.4.1:

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 -R apache:apache /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 -R :apache /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;
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.

We will create an Apache virtual host for your WordPress website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Next, create the virtual host:

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/
nano /etc/httpd/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

Next, allow the Apache ports in the server firewall:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
firewall-cmd --reload

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.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed WordPress. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing WordPress CMS (Content Management Systems) on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WordPress website.