LAMP Server Setup

Sometimes you have a fancy VPS when you really just want a web server. This guide goes through the process of setting up a basic LAMP server with WordPress on Ubuntu.

LAMP Setup

To start out, you’ll need to install some packages. This step will ask you to create a database password, you should pick something secure that you can remember.

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-gd php5-mysql mysql-server-5.6 wget

After installing your packages, enable the rewrite module for pretty URLs in WordPress and other apps that use it.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

You should then edit your Apache configuration file. You’ll need to change the AllowOverride None line in the <Directory /var/www> block from None to All in order for .htaccess files to work properly.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Finally, restart Apache to apply your new configuration.

sudo service apache2 restart

WordPress Setup

Installing WordPress follows a pretty typical process that should work for most web apps and custom sites. We’ll start by creating a database. Run the command below, entering your database password chosen during the package installation.

mysql -uroot -p

Once in the MySQL command line, we’ll create a new database and user. Replace “Passw0rd” with a secure password. You’ll use this username (“wordpress”) and password to install WordPress later.

CREATE DATABASE `wordpress`;
CREATE USER 'wordpress'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Passw0rd';
GRANT ALL ON `wordpress`.* TO 'wordpress'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
\q

After creating a database, we’ll download and unzip WordPress.

cd /var/www
sudo wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
sudo unzip latest.zip
sudo chown -R www-data: wordpress
sudo chmod -R 755 wordpress

We need to tell Apache to run our WordPress code, so next we’ll create a new VirtualHost.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf

Enter the following text in the new file, replacing example.com with your domain (you should point the domain to the server’s IP address as well):

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
</VirtualHost>

If you want additional domains or subdomains to point to this website as well, you can add a ServerAlias line after ServerName, like this:

ServerAlias www.example.com example.org

Now that your VirtualHost is created, enable it and reload Apache.

sudo a2ensite wordpress
sudo service apache2 reload

At this point, if your domain is set up correctly, you should be able to browse to your website and install WordPress. You’ll need the database username and password you set up earlier, and the database hostname should be localhost.

Once installed, you should go into WordPress’s admin panel and change the Permalink style (Settings > Permalinks) to something other than the default to take advantage of Apache’s URL rewrites.