2. Services installation for WordPress instance

In this educational article, we are going through the process of services installation for WordPress instance. In the previous article, we have set up the operating system, now we are proceeding to services setup and configuration.

Login to the server

MacBook-Pro-ID:~ ivan$ ssh [email protected] -i bluegrid.io-edu

Install Apache web server

Update system:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo apt update

Install Apache service:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo apt install apache2

Make sure it automatically starts on the system start:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo systemctl enable apache2.service 

Install DB

My choice of db engine is mariadb so I’ll use it as an example:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo apt install mariadb-server
bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo service mariadb restart

Make sure Mariadb starts on system boot-up:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

Create database user

Login to MySQL

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo mariadb

Example prompt:

It’s good to have one user that will be the admin of the MariaDB server and then we’ll create one for the purpose of connecting the WordPress website with the database.

Create an admin user

Delete it if already exists:

MariaDB [(none)]> drop user if exists admin;

Create a user “admin”:

MariaDB [(none)]> create user admin identified by 'bluepassword';

Grant necessary privileges:

MariaDB [(none)]> grant all on *.* to 'admin' with grant option;

Apply changes:

MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges;

Now let’s create a database our WordPress website will use:

MariaDB [(none)]> create database bluedb;

We can make sure it’s created by running:

MariaDB [(none)]> show databases;

We can see that “bluedb” is there.

Create a user that will be limited to accessing this database only:

MariaDB [(none)]> create user 'bg-wp'@'localhost' identified by 'bgpassword';

Give it access to bluedb:

MariaDB [(none)]> grant all on bluedb.* to 'bg-wp'@'localhost';

Apply changes:

MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges;

If we want to make sure this user has no access to other databases, we can log out from MariaDB and log back in with the bg-wp user, and run the show databases command:

As we can see, just the bluedb can be seen.

Install PHP

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql
bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo service apache2 restart

File system preparations

a) Find a location for your website’s files on the server:

The directory that Apache will treat as public files storge from where the website will be served can be found in the apache2.conf and it’s usually: /var/www/html. Run this command to find out where the website files are expected by the default vhost file:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf | grep DocumentRoot

– For me, it’s /var/www/html –

Important note: /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf is a symbolic link (a shortcut) to /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf. This is a good practice to quickly disable vhost by simply removing the link from sites-enabled without deleting the vhost file from sites-available.

b) Confirm that php and apache2 are working together properly:

Since we know our files are at /var/www/html (in my case at least) we can run a quick test and see how Apache responds to our request for the php file.

• Create index.php file in /var/www/html with the following contents:
  <?php
echo “Works!”;
?>
• Test the response using this command: 
  bg-user@bluegrid:~$ curl http://localhost/index.php
  
  Response:
  
  
  Now delete it so we don’t leave any clutter for the website files we’ll have there:
  bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo rm /var/www/html/index.php 

c) Define locations for access and error log files:

By default, apache keeps log files at /var/log/apache2/access.log and /var/log/apache2/error.log. What we want is to separate the access log for our website from other potential apps or websites we might have on this server:

• First, let’s see the log formats Apache has by default (we can edit if we need more custom log format):

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ grep LogFormat /etc/apache2/apache2.conf 

The result should look something like this:

LogFormat "%v:%p %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vhost_combined
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O" common
LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer
LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent

• We’ll use “combined” format and add it to the vhost file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf as follows:

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/bg-access.log combined

Restart Apache to apply the change:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo service apache2 restart

To test the configuration run this command:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/bg-access.log 

And open your newly installed WordPress website in your browser. The result should be multiple lines on the screen while the tail command is running:

d) Define index.php as a DirectoryIndex so that by default (without specifying) server will serve index.php instead of index.html (which is the default setting):

Open /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf and add these lines in the vhost file:

<Directory />
                DirectoryIndex index.php
</Directory>

Finally

Restart Apache to apply the change:

bg-user@bluegrid:~$ sudo service apache2 restart

Now that we have all the necessary services installed and configured, we can proceed to install WordPress.