LEMP Setup for WordPress on Ubuntu

Instructions to setup Linux, NGINX, MySQL, and PHP on an Ubuntu server to host multiple WordPress websites. Throughout this guide, we are using an SSH user named devopseverywhere in our NGINX file as well as in PHP-FPM configuration. You will have to adjust it to match the SSH user that you create on your server.

Here are some of the points to remember:

We will use a VM with Ubuntu 20.x on a provider like DigitalOcean, Linode, Upcloud, Google Cloud, AWS or any other cloud provider
The VM should not contain any existing installations of PHP, MySQL, NGINX or any other web server stack software
You will be able to run multiple WordPress (or general) websites on a single instance
We will use certbot package to use SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt
We will create a new SSH user with sudo privileges
This user will be used to manage website files (via SFTP or SSH)
This user will be used in NGINX configuration (replacing the default www-data user)
This user will be used in PHP-FPM configuration (replacing the default www-data user)

Sign in

Using a terminal on Unix or PowerShell (or PuTTY) on Windows, sign in as root or a standard user with sudo privileges.

Update System Software

sudo apt update && \
sudo apt install zip

Create SSH User

We will create an SSH user with sudo privileges and we will use this user to manage websites as well as we will run PHP and web server (NGINX) under this user.

sudo adduser devopseverywhere

And create directory to create websites:

sudo mkdir /home/devopseverywhere/sites && \
sudo chown -R devopseverywhere:devopseverywhere /home/devopseverywhere

Assign sudo privileges:

sudo echo 'devopseverywhere ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

Install & Configure NGINX

First of all, install and configure NGINX web server. We will install NGINX, will replace the existing NGINX config with an optimized one and we will modify the directory structure a little to simplify the vhost file creation.

sudo apt -y install nginx

Update NGINX config with an optimized configuration file. The optimized configuration file for NGINX has been included in the source.

cd /etc/nginx && \
rm -rf sites-enabled sites-available && \
mkdir vhosts.d && \
sudo mv nginx.conf nginx-bak && \
cat > nginx.conf <<- EOF
user devopseverywhere;
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
include /etc/nginx/modules-enabled/*.conf;
worker_rlimit_nofile 100000;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log crit;

events {
    worker_connections 4000;
    use epoll;
    multi_accept on;
}

http {
    open_file_cache max=200000 inactive=20s;
    open_file_cache_valid 30s;
    open_file_cache_min_uses 2;
    open_file_cache_errors on;
    access_log off;
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    client_max_body_size 100M;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    gzip on;
    gzip_min_length 10240;
    gzip_comp_level 1;
    gzip_vary on;
    gzip_disable msie6;
    gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
    gzip_types
        text/css
        text/javascript
        text/xml
        text/plain
        text/x-component
        application/javascript
        application/x-javascript
        application/json
        application/xml
        application/rss+xml
        application/atom+xml
        font/truetype
        font/opentype
        application/vnd.ms-fontobject
        image/svg+xml;
    reset_timedout_connection on;
    client_body_timeout 30;
    send_timeout 30;
    keepalive_timeout 90;
    keepalive_requests 100;
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/vhosts.d/*.conf;
}
EOF

Check the NGINX configuration files:

sudo nginx -t

And restart NGINX if no errors encountered:

sudo service nginx restart

Install, Optimize & Secure MySQL

Install MySQL server:

sudo apt install mysql-server

To improve performance, disable general logging:

sudo mysql -e "SET GLOBAL general_log = 'OFF';"

And finally secure your MySQL installation:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Install & Configure PHP

Install PHP-FPM:

sudo apt install php-fpm

Installed some common and required PHP extensions:

sudo apt install php-common php-curl php-imagick php-json php-mbstring php-mysql php-xml php-zip php-bcmath php-gd php-intl php-ssh2

Configure PHP-FPM pools to use our created SSH user:

sudo sed -i 's#www-data#devopseverywhere#g' /etc/php/7.4/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

Note: Be sure to specify the correct PHP version. You can list the directory contents to see the installed PHP version:

cd /etc/php && \
ls

And finally restart PHP-FPM service:

sudo service php7.4-fpm restart

Create First Site

Become our created SSH user:

sudo su devopseverywhere && \
cd /home/devopseverywhere/sites

Create website directory:

mkdir first && \
echo '<?php phpinfo();?>' > first/info.php

Create MySQL user & database. Be sure to use a secure password and store the database name and the password as we will be needing this when setting up our website.

sudo mysql -e "CREATE USER 'firstuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'MySecurePassword135';"
sudo mysql -e "CREATE DATABASE firstdatabase;"
sudo mysql -e "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON firstdatabase.* TO 'firstuser'@'localhost';"
sudo mysql -e "FLUSH PRIVILEGES;"

Download WordPress & unzip the code:

cd /home/devopseverywhere/sites/first && \
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip && \
unzip latest.zip && \
cd wordpress && \
mv * ../ && \
cd .. && \
rm -rf wordpress latest.zip

Create a virtual host. Be sure to use your actual domain names in place of example.com and also point the DNS of your domains to your server IP:

cd /etc/nginx/vhosts.d && \
sudo cat > first.conf <<- EOF
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    root /home/devopseverywhere/first;
    index index.php index.html;

    location / {
         try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$is_args$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}
EOF

Check NGINX config:

sudo nginx -t

And reload if no errors encountered:

sudo service nginx reload

Install SSL

Install Certbot:

sudo snap install certbot --classic

And attempt to get an SSL certificate by providing the needed information:

sudo certbot

You should see your domains to select. Select the domains by providing their (comma-separated) position number. If SSL can't be issued, wait for the DNS to propagate. Be sure that you paused any CDN proxies like CloudFlare otherwise domain ownership validation will fail.

Once SSL is provisioned, visit your domain in the browser and complete WordPress installation by providing the database name and password that you created above. By following the same steps, you can add as many websites as you want.

nicksweb / lemp