Install WordPress on a Linux / MySQL Server — Articles

This document describes the steps to get WordPress running on a Linux Server, for example Cent OS. It assumes that the Linux Server is already installed and preconfigured (networking, updates etc.)

Installing the LAMP stack LAMP

(Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack is a group of open source software used to get websites with databases running. The Linux part is not taken in this document.

Install the LAMP stack — yum groupinstall “Web Server” “PHP Support” “MySQL Database server” “MySQL Database client”
Add PHP-MySQL support — yum install php-mysql
Start Apache — service httpd start systemctl start httpd
Set Apache to automatically start on boot — chkconfig httpd on systemctl enable httpd
Start MySQL — service mysqld start systemctl start mysqld
Set MySQL to automatically start on boot — chkconfig mysqld on systemctl enable mysqld
To set a password for the MySQL root user. — mysqladmin -u root password ‘new-password’
Or run wizard to set a MySQL root password. This will guide you through a wizard. Say Yes to all the options. — /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

Creating a database for WordPress

Access the MySQL shell — mysql -uroot -pYourPassword or mysql –user=root –password=YourPassword
Create a database — create database wordpressdb;
Set permissions — grant all privileges on wordpressdb.* to ‘wordpressdb’@’localhost’ identified by ‘YOURNEWPASS’;
Activate permissions — flush privileges;
Exit the MySQL shell — exit;

Installing WordPress

Change directory to /root — cd /root
Download WordPress — wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz if wget not available, install it by yum install wget
Extract WordPress — tar -xvzf /root/latest.tar.gz -C /target/directory
Sync the extracted files to your DocumentRoot — rsync -avz wordpress/ /var/www/ if rsync not available, install it by yum install rsync
Remove the wordpress source files — rm latest.tar.gz
rm -rf wordpress/
Create the WordPress config file by copying from the sample file — cp /var/www/wp-config-sample.php /var/www/wp-config.php
Set the database credentials in /var/www/wp-config.php — sed -i ‘s/database_name_here/your-db/’ /var/www/wp-config.php sed -i ‘s/username_here/your-username/’ /var/www/wp-config.php sed -i ‘s/password_here/your-password/’ /var/www/wp-config.php sed -i ‘s/localhost/your-dbserver/’ /var/www/wp-config.php

Secure your site by setting the correct permissions

Set Apache user as the owner for your DocumentRoot — chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/yoursite
Modify permissions — chmod -R 400 /var/www/html/yoursite chmod -R a+X /var/www/html/yoursite

WordPress requires write access into the /wp-content folder to could install plugings, themes or updates.

Provide write permissions to WordPress — chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/yoursite/wp-content