Install WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a popular PHP-based dynamic content management system (CMS) focused on blogging. You can easily install WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04 because it is configured to work with Apache or NGINIX, MySql, PHP in a LAMP or a LEMP stack. It also features an extensive plugin framework, and theme system that allows site owners to use the simple and powerful publishing tools.

Note

This guide is written for a non-root user. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, visit our Users and Groups guide.

All configuration files should be edited with elevated privileges. Remember to include sudo before running your text editor.

Replace each instance of example.com in this guide with the domain name or IP address of the website.

Before You Begin Installing WordPress

• Follow the Getting Started and Securing Your Server guides, and ensure that the Linode’s hostname is set.

  To check the hostname run:

  hostname
  hostname -f
  

  The first command outputs the short hostname; the second, a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).

• Configure a LAMP or LEMP web stack on Ubuntu 18.04 installation.

• If you are running NGINX, edit the location / block of the configuration to set index.php as an index for the site:

  File: /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

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  location / { index index.php index.html index.htm; try_files $uri $uri/ =404; }

• If you are using Apache, run the following commands to ensure that mod_rewrite is enabled:

  sudo a2enmod status

If it isn't already enabled, enable a2enmod and restart Apache:

    sudo a2enmod rewrite
    sudo systemctl restart apache2

Install WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04

Prepare the WordPress Database in MySQL

WordPress stores blog posts and other content in a MySQL database, and you need to prepare the database before you can start using WordPress:

1. Log in to the MySQL command line as the root user:

   sudo mysql -u root
   

2. Create the WordPress database:

   1	CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

3. Create a user and grant privileges for the newly created wordpress database, replacing wpuser and password with the username and password you wish to use:

   1 2	CREATE USER 'wpuser' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser';

4. Exit MySQL:

   1

   quit

Download WordPress

1. Create a directory called src under the website’s directory to store fresh copies of WordPress’s source files. In this guide, the home directory /var/www/html/example.com/ is used as an example. Navigate to that new directory:

   sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/example.com/src/
   cd /var/www/html/example.com/src/
   

2. Set the web server’s user, www-data, as the owner of the home directory for the site:

   sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/example.com/
   

3. Install the latest version of WordPress and extract it:

   sudo wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
   sudo -u www-data tar -xvf latest.tar.gz
   

4. Rename latest.tar.gz as wordpress followed by the date to store a backup of the original source files. This is useful if you install new versions in the future and need to revert to a previous release:

   sudo mv latest.tar.gz wordpress-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`.tar.gz
   

5. Create a public_html directory as the root directory for WordPress. Move the WordPress files to the public_html folder:

   sudo mkdir /var/www/html/example.com/public_html/
   sudo mv wordpress/* ../public_html/
   

6. Give the web server ownership of the public_html folder:

   sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/example.com/public_html
   

Configure WordPress

1. Visit the domain in a web browser and follow the steps shown onscreen. Select your preferred language, review the information page and click the Let’s go! button. Enter the database credentials that were set when you installed MySQL:

   WordPress tests the credentials and if authentication is successful, prompts you to Run the install.

   Note

   If WordPress doesn’t display when you visit the domain, try adding /wp-admin to the end of the URL. This sometimes happens if you previously created an index file in the site’s home directory.

2. Fill out the administration information and click Install WordPress.

   Click Log In, enter the credentials and proceed to the WordPress Dashboard.

3. By default, WordPress prompts you for FTP credentials when you install new themes or plugins. To bypass this, modify the wp-config.php file by adding the following lines:

   File: /var/www/html/example.com/public_html/wp-config.php

   1 2	/** Bypass FTP */ define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

4. To make changes to the site in the future, you can access the Dashboard of the WordPress site from the web interface by adding /wp-admin to the site’s URL: example.com/wp-admin.

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed WordPress.

Create WordPress Permalinks (Optional)

Permalink is a portmanteau of the words permanent and link. Permalinks are URLs that are automatically created for specific posts or pages in WordPress so that you or others can link to them. WordPress’s default settings assign post numbers as permalinks, meaning a link to a specific post would look like example.com/?p=42. To enforce a “prettier” permalink format, you need to make a few adjustments to Apache or nginx.

For more information on permalinks, visit the WordPress guide on permalinks.

To configure permalink settings:

1. Log in to the WordPress admin panel through the site’s /wp-admin URL.

2. Mouseover Settings in the menu on the left of the screen, then click Permalinks:

   

3. Select a preferred permalink style or create your own Custom Structure and click Save Changes

4. Configure the web server to allow WordPress to create the customized URLs using the appropriate section below.

Configure WordPress to Allow Permalinks on Apache

Instruct Apache to allow individual sites to update the .htaccess file, by adding the following options to the Directory section in the virtual host configuration:

File: /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com

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<Directory /var/www/html/example.com/public_html> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory>

Reload Apache to enable the changes:

sudo systemctl reload apache2

Configure WordPress to Allow Permalinks on NGINX

Direct nginx to check whether each permalink refers to an existing page. By default, nginx assumes that it doesn’t, and returns a server-side 404. Update the following lines in the location / { block in the virtual host configuration:

File: /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

1 2 3 4

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

Reload NGINX to enable the changes:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Configure Maximum File Size Upload Setting to Allow Larger Files

By default, PHP restricts web uploads to under two megabytes. To allow larger file uploads through the web interface, configure the upload_max_filesize setting in php.ini:

Apache: /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini

NGINX: /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini

File: php.ini

1 2 3

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files. ; http://php.net/upload-max-filesize upload_max_filesize = 2M

Install Optional PHP Extensions

WordPress, and many of its plugins, use PHP extensions that you need to install manually. This section is optional, but it allows you to access some WordPress features that you may not have with a basic PHP installation.

• In order to modify photos or images in Wordpress, you need the PHP-GD extension. For example, when you upload an image to use as a header, you may need to crop the image to make it fit the page.

To install the GD extension:

    sudo apt install php-gd

• For full non-English language support and to fix certain character encoding-related bugs, install the multibyte string (MBSTRING) extension.

To install MBSTRING:

    sudo apt install php-mbstring

• To use XML-RPC to access WordPress with the mobile app, or to use Jetpack, you need php-xmlrpc. For more information on XML-RPC, visit the WordPress guide on XML-RPC. For more information on Jetpack, visit Jetpack for Wordpress.

To install the XML-RPC extension:

    sudo apt install php-xmlrpc

These are only a few of the extensions that you may find useful. Plenty of other PHP extensions exist and are required for certain plugin features, such as php-curl, and php-xml. If you have issues with a plugin or widget, check the official documentation of the plugin to see if a PHP extension is required.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• WordPress.org
• WordPress Codex
• WordPress Support