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WordPress is one of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS) with a market share of up to 60% compared to other CMS like Drupal or Joomla. WordPress can be used to develop any type of website, be it a blog, a small business, or a large enterprise. With its free and premium plugins and themes, a WordPress website can be quickly extended to provide advanced functionality. Custom themes and plugins can also be developed from scratch to embed unique features to any WordPress website. In this article, we will cover the installation of WordPress CMS using the LEMP stack, i.e. NGINX as a web server in Ubuntu 18.04.

Prerequisites

• We can open an SSH session in Ubuntu 18.04 server using root or a sudo enabled user.
• A registered domain name or subdomain pointing to your WordPress installation.
• A DNS A record for your domain pointing to your server's IP address.

This tutorial requires the use of domain names. Whenever we see SUBDOMAIN, , DOMAINor TLDvariables, replace them with your own domain name values.

Update your Ubuntu 18.04

Before starting to install NGINX, it is always recommended to upgrade Ubuntu 18.04 to the latest version. The following apt-getcommand will do it for us.

$ apt-get update 
$ apt-get upgrade

The first command will update the list of available packages and their versions and the second command will actually install the newer version of the packages we have. Once the system upgrade is complete, check the release version of your Ubuntu system using the following command.

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Release:        18.04
Codename:       bionic

Installing WordPress with NGINX on Ubuntu

Follow the steps below to install WordPress with NGINX on Ubuntu server.

Step 1: Install NGINX

NGINX is available in the default repositories of Ubuntu and can be installed using a single line command as shown below.

$ apt-get install nginx

For a more detailed nginx installation tutorial, you can refer to our " How to install Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04? "

Step 2: Install MariaDB

MariaDB is available in the default repositories of Ubuntu. It can also be installed from a separate MariaDB repository. But we will stick to installing it from the default repositories of Ubuntu. Use the following command from the terminal to install it and we can optionally run mysql_secure_installationto make it safe.

$ apt-get install mariadb-server 
$ systemctl enable mariadb.service
$ mysql_secure_installation

The default password for the MariaDB root user is blank. To update the password for the root user, get the MySQL prompt and update the password by issuing the following commands from the MySQL shell.

$ mysql -u root -p
MariaDB [(none)]> use mysql;
MariaDB [mysql]> update user SET PASSWORD=PASSWORD("Passw0rd!") WHERE USER='root';

MariaDB has been installed in Ubuntu 18.04 system. Now proceed to install PHP in the next step.

Step 3: Install PHP

The latest version of PHP (7.2) is available in the repositories of Ubuntu 18.04 and is the default installation candidate, so just run the following command in your terminal to install it.

$ apt-get install php7.2 php7.2-cli php7.2-fpm php7.2-mysql php7.2-json php7.2-opcache php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xml php7.2-gd php7.2-curl

In addition to installing php7.2, the command above apt-getalso installs a few other packages as well as the MySQL, XML, Curl, and GD packages, and ensures that our WordPress site can interact with the database, supports XMLRPC, and can also crop and automatically resize images. In addition, NGINX requires the php-fpm (Fast Process Manager) package to handle the PHP pages of the WordPress installation. Remember that once PHP is installed, the FPM service will automatically run.

Step 4: Create a WordPress database

After installing and configuring MariaDB in your server, create a user and a database specifically for WordPress installation. To do this, mysql -u root -plog in to the MariaDB server using the command and complete the steps described below.

$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

MariaDB [mysql]> CREATE DATABASE wordpress_db;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [mysql]> GRANT ALL ON wordpress_db.* TO 'wpuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Passw0rd!' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [mysql]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [mysql]> exit

Don't panic because there is no command to create the "wpuser" database user. It will be created automatically using the GRANT command above. I learned this recently and thought it would come as a surprise to anyone reading this tutorial. :)

Step 5. Configure NGINX for WordPress

Now let's move on to configuring the NGINX server block to serve our WordPress domain. First, create the root folder for our WordPress installation.

$ mkdir -p /var/www/html/wordpress/public_html

To create the NGINX server block for our WordPress domain, go to the /etc/nginx/sites-available folder. This is the default location for the NGINX server block. Create a configuration file for the NGINX server block using your favorite editor and edit it as shown below.

$ cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
$ cat wordpress.conf

The content is as follows

server {
            listen 80;
            root /var/www/html/wordpress/public_html;
            index index.php index.html;
            server_name SUBDOMAIN.DOMAIN.TLD;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/SUBDOMAIN.access.log;
            error_log /var/log/nginx/SUBDOMAIN.error.log;

            location / {
                         try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
            }

            location ~ \.php$ {
                         include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
                         fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
            }
            
            location ~ /\.ht {
                         deny all;
            }

            location = /favicon.ico {
                         log_not_found off;
                         access_log off;
            }

            location = /robots.txt {
                         allow all;
                         log_not_found off;
                         access_log off;
           }
       
            location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
                         expires max;
                         log_not_found off;
           }
}

Use the following command to check the correctness of the above configuration file:

$ nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

To activate the Server block, create a symbolic link to the above configuration file in the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled folder.

$ cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
$ ln -s ../sites-available/wordpress.conf .

Reload NGINX to apply the new WordPress domain settings.

$ systemctl reload nginx

Step 6. Download and configure WordPress

In this step, download the archived WordPress files using wget and extract them to the root directory of the WordPress installation we created in the previous step. To complete it, run the following command from the terminal.

$ cd /var/www/html/wordpress/public_html
$ wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz
$ mv wordpress/* .
$ rm -rf wordpress

Change ownership and apply correct permissions to the extracted WordPress files and folders. To do this, use the following command from the terminal.

$ cd /var/www/html/wordpress/public_html
$ chown -R www-data:www-data *
$ chmod -R 755 *

Now provide the database name, database user, and password in the WordPress configuration file so that it can connect to the MariaDB database we created earlier. By default, WordPress provides a sample configuration file which we will use to create our own. To do this, first, rename the sample WordPress configuration file to wp-config.php and edit it using your own favorite editor.

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

Some of the content is as follows

 ...
 ...
 define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress_db');
 define('DB_USER', 'wpuser');
 define('DB_PASSWORD', 'Passw0rd!');
 ...
 ...

To protect your WordPress site, please add the security key in the above WordPress configuration file, just after the database configuration options, generate it via this link .

We are now ready to install our WordPress site using your favorite browser.

Step 7: Install WordPress

To complete the WordPress installation, point our favorite web browser to SUBDOMAIN.DOMAIN.TLDand follow the steps as described below

The installer will prompt us to select a language. Select a language and click Continue.

Now provide the site information like site title, username, password, email and click on the Install WordPress button.

We have finished installing our WordPress website. Click Log In to log into the control panel and continue configuring plugins and themes for our site.

Provide the username and password we entered earlier for the first login.

Congratulations! Your WordPress website is installed and ready to be customized according to your requirements.

In this example, click jiyik.com in the upper left corner to jump to the website page

Summarize

WordPress is the most popular CMS, and we have learned how to install it with NGINX on an Ubuntu server. Now we can move on to creating our own website using it.