How to Install WordPress with LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 18.04

WordPress is the world’s leading content management system. Used by tens of millions of web pages and internet creators alike, WordPress is the backbone of most blogs and news outlets. Webpage performance with WordPress is also typically one of the fastest available. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WordPress with LAMP stack on Ubuntu 18.04.

Requirements:

• For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use an Ubuntu VPS. Our Ubuntu VPS already comes preinstalled with a fully working LAMP stack. However, we will still go through all the necessary steps and show you how to install and configure the LAMP stack yourself, in case you are doing this on a clean server.
• Full SSH root access or a user with sudo privileges is also required
• A valid domain name for accessing your WordPress site (optional)

Step 1: Connect to your Server

To connect to your server via SSH as user root, use the following command:

ssh root@IP_ADDRESS -p PORT_NUMBER

and replace “IP_ADDRESS” and “PORT_NUMBER” with your actual server IP address and SSH port number.

Once logged in, make sure that your server is up-to-date by running the following commands:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2: Apache Web Server Installation

To install the Apache web server, run the following command:

apt-get install apache2

After the installation is complete, you should enable Apache to start automatically upon server boot with:

systemctl enable apache2

You can also check the status of your Apache service with the following command:

systemctl status apache2

Output:

apache2.service - The Apache HTTP Server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/apache2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service.d
           └─apache2-systemd.conf
   Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-12-19 03:44:49 CST; 21min ago
 Main PID: 905 (apache2)
    Tasks: 7 (limit: 1110)
   CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service
           ├─  905 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
           ├─  923 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
           ├─  926 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
           ├─  927 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
           ├─  928 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
           ├─  929 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
           └─16816 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

Step 3: Install PHP

The next step of our LAMP stack setup is to install PHP. 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 might not have access to with a basic PHP installation.

apt install php php-curl php-gd php-mbstring php-xml php-xmlrpc php-soap php-intl php-zip

You can check your PHP version with the following command:

php -v

Output:

PHP 7.2.10-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 (cli) (built: Sep 13 2018 13:45:02) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.2.10-0ubuntu0.18.04.1, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies

Step 4: Install the MySQL Database server

Finally, MySQL is the last software package we need to finish installing our LAMP stack. MySQL is an open-source database management system, commonly installed as part of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. It is a very popular choice for managing databases, thanks to its continuous development and extensive feature set.

On Ubuntu 18.04, only the latest version of MySQL is included in the APT package repository by default.

To install the default package, run the following command:

$ apt install mysql-server

This will install MySQL version 5.7 on your server, but it will not prompt you to set a password or make any other configuration changes. Because this leaves your installation of MySQL vulnerable, in order to improve the security of your MySQL server, we recommend that you run the mysql_secure_installation script by typing the following command:

mysql_secure_installation

This script will help you to perform important security tasks, like setting up a root password, disabling remote root login, removing anonymous users, etc.

Step 5: Create a Database for WordPress

Now, we will create our MySQL database for our WordPress site. Log in to your MySQL server with the following command and enter your MySQL root password:

mysql -u root -p

In this section, we will create a new MySQL database wordpress and assign user access to it to a new user admin_user with password StrongPassword

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'admin_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'StrongPassword';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Don’t forget to replace ‘StrongPassword’ with an actual strong password.

Step 6: Install WordPress

We can now proceed with the actual installation of WordPress.  Run the following commands to download and extract the latest WordPress installation files in the default web server document root directory (/var/www/html).

cd /var/www/html
wget -c http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress
rm latest.zip

All the WordPress files will be now placed in the wordpress directory in /var/www/html/wordpress

Once the database is created, we will need to add this information to the WordPress configuration file.

First, run the following command to rename the sample configuration file:

cd /var/www/html/wordpress
mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Now open the wp-config.php file with your favorite text editor, for example:

nano wp-config.php

And update the database settings, replacing database_name_here, username_here and password_here with your own details:

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'admin_user');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'StrongPassword');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Save and exit the file.

Step 6: Create the Virtual Host Files

We can now create our virtual host files. Run the following command to create the virtual host configuration file for your domain, your_domain.com:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.com.conf

And add the following content to the file:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin admin@your_domain.com
ServerName your_domain.com
ServerAlias www.your_domain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/wordpress

<Directory /var/www/html/wordpress>
     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride All
     Require all granted
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your_domain.com_error.log 
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your_domain.com_access.log combined 
</VirtualHost>

To enable the virtual host we have just created, run the following command:

ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/your_domain.com.conf

Step 7: Configure WordPress

In the last step of this guide, we need to access the WordPress Web Interface and finish the installation.

To finish the installation, open your browser and navigate to:

http://your_domain.com/

Choose your language and click “Continue”.

Enter your preferred information at the main installation screen, such as the site title, and your username, password, and email, and click on “Install WordPress”:

You will be informed that WordPress has been successfully installed and you can now log in to your administration dashboard using the information you have set up previously.

After a successful login, you will be greeted by the WordPress dashboard page:

Congratulations! WordPress has been successfully installed on your server. You can now start building and customize your site according to your needs.

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Of course, you don’t have to install WordPress with LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 18.04 if you use one of our Optimized WordPress Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert system administrators to install WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04 for you, using the LAMP stack or any other web hosting stack of your choice. They are available 24/7 and will take care of your request immediately. If you enjoyed reading this post you might also want to consider reading how to Install WordPress with LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 20.04.

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