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Install WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04

Updated by Edward Angert Written by Linode

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What is WordPress?

WordPress is a popular dynamic content management system (CMS) focused on blogs. WordPress can be deployed on a LAMP or LEMP stack. It features an extensive plugin framework and theme system that allows site owners to use its simple, yet powerful publishing tools.

Install WordPress on Ubuntu

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 your site’s domain name or IP.

Before You Begin

  • This guide assumes you have followed the Getting Started and Securing Your Server guides, and that your Linode’s hostname is set.

    To check your hostname run:

    hostname
hostname -f

    The first command will output your short hostname; the second, your fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).

  • Configure a LAMP or LEMP web stack.

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

    /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’re 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

Prepare the WordPress Database

WordPress stores blog posts and other content in your 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:

    CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

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

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

  4. Exit MySQL:

    quit

Download WordPress

  1. Create a directory called src under your 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 your web server’s user, www-data, as the owner of your site’s home directory:

    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 will be useful if you install new versions in the future and need to revert back to a previous release:

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

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

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

  6. Give your 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 your 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 Setup: Configure Database

    WordPress will test the credentials and if authentication is successful, prompt you to Run the install.

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

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

    WordPress Setup: Configure Site

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

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

    /var/www/html/example.com/public_html/wp-config.php 
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    /** Bypass FTP */
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

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

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed WordPress.

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’ll 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 your site’s /wp-admin URL.

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

    Wordpress Settings Permalinks

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

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

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

/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

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 your virtual host configuration:

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

php.ini 
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; 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’ll need to install manually. This section is optional, but it will allow you to access some WordPress features you may not have with a basic PHP installation.

  • In order to modify photos or images in Wordpress, you’ll 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 your 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 via the mobile app, or to use Jetpack, you’ll 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 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 its documentation 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.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.