First things first and disclaimers
You should already have a Vultr instance running with Ubuntu 14.04 that’s ready to go and have SSH access to it. Vultr does also offer a one-click install for WordPress that gets installed on CentOS. Feel free to use that, I just prefer Ubuntu is all.
This also isn’t the one and only way to setting up a LAMP stack and installing WordPress. This just happens to be a template I use over and over. Simply use this as a guide.
Edit: This is a little out of date with new versions of Ubuntu out and newer, easier ways of doing things. However, this could still be helpful as a guide to most.
And on with it
- Getting Passwords Ready
- https://xkpasswd.net/s/
Document different passwords for each:
- Root
- MySQL Root
- MySQL User
Setup Web Host
cat >> /etc/hosts <<EOF <PUBLIC IP> site.com EOF
Install Packages
Add PHP7 PPA and get things up to date.
apt-get update apt-get install software-properties-common add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade -y apt-get install -y mariadb-server php7.0 php7.0-mysql apache2 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-xml php7.0-gd
Use your super secret password you documented from above.
root: <MySQL Root Password>
Secure MySQL.
mysql_secure_installation No Yes Yes Yes Yes nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
- Change the first HTML to PHP
- Change the second PHP to HTML
Some of the needed modules are not enabled by default, so enable them.
a2enmod \ expires \ headers \ rewrite \ ssl
Remove insecure ciphers and protocols and enable perfect forward secrecy if all parties support it.
sed -i \ 's/^\(\s*\)#\?\s*SSLHonorCipherOrder\s.*/\1SSLHonorCipherOrder On/' \ /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf
sed -i \ 's/^\(\s*\)#\?\s*SSLProtocol.*/\1SSLProtocol ALL -SSLv2 -SSLv3/' \ /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf
sed -i \ 's/^\(\s*\)#\?\s*SSLCipherSuite\s.*/\1SSLCipherSuite ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS/' \ /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf
Turn off the expose_php setting.
sed -i "s/expose_php =.*/expose_php = Off/" /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini
Setup your database.
mysql -u root -p <MySQL root password> CREATE DATABASE <db-name>; CREATE USER <user>@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '<MySQL user password>'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON <db-name>.* TO "<user>"@"localhost"; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; QUIT
Install WordPress.
cd ~ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz tar xzvf latest.tar.gz cd ~/wordpress cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php nano wp-config.php
Retrieve SALTs:
Paste in wp-config.php
While you’re in the wp-config.php, be sure to update the database connection settings above the SALTs area.
sudo rsync -avP ~/wordpress/ /var/www/html/ cd /var/www/html mkdir /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads sudo chown -R www-data:www-data * chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
Change File size and Post size limits. (you can use CNTL + W to search when using nano)
nano /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini upload_max_filesize = 32M post_max_size = 16M
Fix permalinks.
nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Ensure Allow Override is enabled:
AllowOverride All
And finally just to flush everything out and get a fresh start, I reboot the server real quick. This is probably overkill but it makes me feel better.
sudo shutdown -r now
Now go to your site’s URL and test it out. You should be presented with a WordPress site setup dialog. What I usually do at this point is go ahead with setting up SSL.
