MkFoster / wordpress-install-notes

Readme with step-by-step instructions to install WordPress on an Ubuntu 20 LTS system

wordpress-install-notes

This is my abbreviated step-by-step notes on how to install WordPress on an Ubuntu 20 LTS system. Note: Replace example.com with your own domain where applicable.

These two articles on Digital Ocean were super-helpful the first time I did this on Ubuntu:

• How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on Ubuntu 20.04 by Erika Heidi
• How To Install WordPress on Ubuntu 20.04 with a LAMP Stack by Lisa Tagliaferri

Get a an Ubuntu 20 LTS instance

Note: WordPress runs great on Arm64 systems like Amazon's Graviton EC2 instances and use less power.

Here's a list of service providers where you can get an Ubuntu 20 LTS instance up and running quickly

• Amazon EC2 Graviton Arm64 instances I.e., M6g and T4g
• Amazon EC2 x86 instances
• Amazon Lightsail
• Digital Ocean Droplets
• Linode
• Nearly any place that offer VPS hosting

Setup the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) Stack

These instructions assume your Ubuntu 20 LTS instance is up and running and you are logged-in, sitting at a shell prompt via Putty or some other SSH client.

• Do an apt update: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
• Install Apache: sudo apt install apache2
• If you don't have a firewall in front of your instance, enable the Ubuntu firewall:

sudo ufw allow in "Apache Full"
sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw enable

• Reboot the instance and check the firewall status:

sudo ufw status

#It should look like this:
Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
Apache Full                ALLOW       Anywhere                  
OpenSSH                    ALLOW       Anywhere                  
Apache Full (v6)           ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

• Install MySQL and secure it

sudo apt install mysql-server
sudo mysql_secure_installation

• Select options to enforce strong passwords. Choose 'y' for "VALIDATE PASSWORD COMPONENT" and press '2" for "STRONG". Use a strong password for the DB root user and put it somewhere safe. A password manager like 1Password or LastPass is a good place. Choose 'y' to remove anonymous users, disallow root login remotely, remove the test DB, and reload the privilege tables.

• Install PHP. Note: Do not install Imagemagick because it has a bug that crashes the server on large image uploads.

sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql
php -v #Check to PHP version after installing the above packages

After the package installation is complete, use "php -v" to make sure the PHP version. Compare the versions at https://www.php.net/downloads.php and make sure the major and minor numbers (I.e. 7.4.x) match recent releases so the instance won't be out of date too quickly.

• Enable large image uploads by setting the following in the "sudo nano /etc/php/7.4/apache2/php.ini" file.

memory_limit = 128M
upload_max_filesize = 20M
post_max_size = 20M
max_execution_time = 30

Create a new Apache virtual host for WordPress

• Create a new folder for your site, change ownership, and start a new Apache conf file using Nano. Note: substitute "example.com" with your own domain.

sudo mkdir /var/www/example.com
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com
sudo chmod 775 /var/www/example.com
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

• Update the domain and paste the following config to your domain conf file in the Nano session. Use CTRL-X to save and exit the Nano editor.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

<Directory /var/www/example.com/>
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

• Enable the new virtual host, disable the old default website, test the config, and reload Apache.

sudo a2ensite example.com
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2dissite 000-default
sudo apache2ctl configtest
sudo systemctl restart apache2

• Create a test HTML document with Nano and point your web browser at the public IP address assigned to your instance to verify it works.

sudo nano /var/www/example.com/index.html

Here is a simple HTML document you can copy paste to Nano to test with.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>example.com website</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World!</h1>

    <p>This is the landing page of <strong>magicby.design</strong>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

• Create a test PHP document with the command line below and access it with your browser at the same IP as above but with a /info.php on it.

sudo nano /var/www/example.com/info.php
#Add this line and save the file: <?php phpinfo();

If everything looks OK, delete the file so you are not providing sensitive info about your server. Also, delete index.html so it won't be the default document.

sudo rm /var/www/example.com/info.php
sudo rm /var/www/example.com/index.html

WordPress Setup

• Install PHP extensions commonly need by WordPress and WordPress plugins

sudo apt install php-curl php-gd php-mbstring php-xml php-xmlrpc php-soap php-intl php-zip
sudo systemctl restart apache2

• Log into MySQL, set up users, and database.

sudo mysql -u root -p
CREATE USER 'example-wp-user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-awesome-password';
CREATE DATABASE `example-wp-db`;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `example-wp-db`.* TO "example-wp-user"@"localhost";
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

• Download and unzip the WordPress install and create an empty .htaccess file for later use.

cd /tmp
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xzvf latest.tar.gz
touch /tmp/wordpress/.htaccess

• Create and edit the Wordpress Config

cp /tmp/wordpress/wp-config-sample.php /tmp/wordpress/wp-config.php
mkdir /tmp/wordpress/wp-content/upgrade #So WordPress can upgrade later

• Copy the WordPress folder contents to the web server document root and update the permissions

sudo cp -a /tmp/wordpress/. /var/www/example.com
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com
#sudo find /var/www/example.com/ -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;
#sudo find /var/www/example.com/ -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;

• Edit the WordPress Config File

sudo nano /var/www/example.com/wp-config.php

• Set DB_NAME to 'example-wp-db'.
• Set DB_USER to 'example-wp-user'.
• Set DB_PASSWORD to the password you previously defined.
• Add a new line below to the end of the config to set the filesystem access method to direct so WP doesn't prompt for FTP credentials when performing some actions.

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

• Use the WordPress.org secret key API to create key and salt values for:

AUTH_KEY
SECURE_AUTH_KEY
LOGGED_IN_KEY
NONCE_KEY
AUTH_SALT
SECURE_AUTH_SALT
LOGGED_IN_SALT
NONCE_SALT

• Copy and paste the key and salt values into the wp-config.php
• Save the file (CTRL-X)
• Load the site URL/IP in your browser and configure it. Set a Site Title, Username (I.e., jdoe), Password, and Email

Enable SSL with Let's Encrypt/Certbot

• Verify your firewall and/or security group settings allow HTTPS/443 TCP inbound traffic
• Install and run certbot and python3-certbot-apache

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache
sudo certbot --apache

Provide an email address, agree to the terms, use "1,2" to protect both names, and choose "2" to do the redirect.

Plugins need for a 100% Lighthouse Score

• Autoptimize - Makes your site faster by optimizing CSS, JS, Images, Google fonts and more. - Must enable optimization/aggregation of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.