Digital Linx Hosting

Installing Wordpress in Debian from scratch

Posted by admin under Debian VPS, Tutorials, VPS

After you have rebuilt your VPS node with one of our Debian OS templates, login via SSH using a ssh client such as putty.

Our Debian templates are quite minimal and very little is currently running, in order to run wordpress we would need to install some applications and services such as; apache, php, mysql and ftp server (optional)

Installing packages with Debian is easy issue the following command to install the above applications and services;

apt-get install apache2 mysql-server-5.0 php5 php5-mysql php5-mcrypt php5-mhash proftpd unzip zip

When prompted press “y” then enter to install everything including their dependencies. A blue window should show in your SSH terminal asking if you wish to run proftpd as a standalone server or initd service, choose standalone.

After the installation is finished your VPS should be running apache, mysql and proftpd.

Now it’s time to configure everything so you can install wordpress.

First lets create an unprivileged user where we will store all website data.

adduser blog

When prompted enter a secure, nonreusable password.

Now lets setup a mysql passwords issue;

mysql

Inside your mysql prompt enter these commads;

use mysql

update user set password=PASSWORD("YOUR_SECURE_NONREUSABLE_PASSWORD") where User='root';

flush privileges;

quit

Now lets test our new mysql root password, issue

mysql -p

When prompted enter the password you just set.

Now lets create a new database and a unprivileged mysql user for our blog to use, inside your mysql prompt enter these commands;

create database wordpress;

grant all privileges on wordpress.* to 'blog'@'localhost' identified by 'YOUR_SECURE_NONREUSABLE_PASSWORD' with grant option;

flush privileges;

quit

OK, now we took care of the mysql stuff, lets move on to apache. In order to not expand the scope of this tutorial I will assume that you have a domain/host pointed at your VPS’s dedicated IP. I will use blog.com as an example in this tutorial.

Issue the following command to create a new apache name based vhost;

nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/blog.com.conf

And paste the following content (replace blog.com with your domain, use your right click mouse button to paste text in nano);

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin webmaster@blog.com
ServerName blog.com
ServerAlias www.blog.com
DocumentRoot /home/blog/www/
ErrorLog /home/blog/logs/error.log
CustomLog /home/blog/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Now lets create those specific directories in blog’s home directory;

su blog

mkdir logs

mkdir www

exit

Now lets restart apache so it will load our custom configuration;

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now we have everything we need to install wordpress;

su blog

cd /home/blog/www

wget wordpress.org/latest.zip

unzip latest.zip

mv wordpress/* .

rm -rf wordpress latest.zip

chmod 777 .

Now point your browser at http://blog.com and begin the easy to follow wordpress installation

The database name we created above was named “wordpress” and the database username was named “blog” with password “YOUR_SECURE_NONREUSABLE_PASSWORD”, leave the values of Database Host and Table prefix as they are (unless you know what you’re doing). Insert those values accordingly and click Submit.

That’s it, your wordpress blog is installed and you can enjoy all the features wordpress can provide.

After you have finished the wordpress configuration wizard (set blog name, email etc) you’d need to clean up a bit, return to your SSH seasion and issue these commands;

exit # so you would be logged in as root

cd /home/blog/www

chmod 755 .

chown blog:blog wp-config.php

chmod 644 wp-config.php

And you’re done, you may also use your username blog to login via ftp to manage your files.

Of course this setup isn’t limited to wordpress only, you may also install any mysql driven web application in a sub directory inside /home/blog/www/

This is a minimal and secure way to host your websites, you may add as many websites as you want repeating these steps

• Create a new system user by issuing adduser username command
• Create a new vhost configuration file in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ by issuing nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/sitename.com.conf following the template above
• Restarting apache by issuing /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
• Creating a new mysql database and username using the mysql commands provided above

This is a rather copy/paste tutorial, provided that you edit significant parts like domain name, usernames and passwords.