This is what I do to get WordPress running on both Ubuntu 11.04 and the current CrunchBang Statler. This is just for getting development environments running quickly, don’t follow this blindly if you’re setting up a live public facing server.
First of all I install the wordpress package. I don’t actually use the installed WordPress, but it just makes sure everything is installed that you need.
apt-get update apt-get install wordpress libssh2-php mysql-server
libssh2-php allows us to install themes and plugins via ssh which I prefer to the ftp methods. When installing mysql I don’t set a password for root – so just hit return each time it asks you. It will ask you a number of times. When everything is installed it’s time to download the latest WordPress from their site. I keep all my development sites in a projects directory so I do:
cd ~/projects wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz tar -zxpvf latest.tar.gz mv wordpress zobbo.org
These files will need to be writeable by the webserver so I add myself to the www-data group and make the new project directory read-writeable by the same group:
sudo adduser ian www-data sudo chmod -R g+rw zobbo.org
Now let’s create our database
mysqladmin create zobbo.org -u root
The final thing we need to do is setup our webserver to server this. I add an entry for our server into my local hosts file and create an apache virtual config for it.
sudo emacs -nw /etc/hosts
and add the line
127.0.0.1 zobbo.local
Now create our new apache config
sudo emacs -nw /etc/apache2/sites-available/zobbo.org
and put the following into it
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName zobbo.local ServerAdmin ian@zobbo.org DocumentRoot /home/ian/projects/zobbo.org <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None </Directory> <Directory /home/ian/projects/zobbo.org> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined </VirtualHost>
We need to enable the site and also allow for URL writing as I like to use prettier permalinks. So we do:
sudo a2ensite zobbo.org sudo a2enmod rewrite sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
Now if you open your web browser and go to http://zobbo.local you’ll go through the WordPress installation procedure. Fill in the details and your site should be up and running within minutes.