16 February 2016

How To Install WordPress with Nginx on Ubuntu 15.10 & 14.04

Written by Rahul K.

WordPress is a free, open source a content-management system (CMS) and blogging tool based on PHP and MySQL. This tutorial will help you to install WordPress with Nginx on Ubuntu system.

Step 1 – Setup LEMP Stack

First we will add all required PPA to our system. Following commands will add PPA for Nginx, PHP5 and MySQL on your system.

$ echo "deb-src http://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ `lsb_release -cs` nginx"  >> /etc/apt/sources.list
$ echo "deb http://nginx.org/packages/mainline/ubuntu/ `lsb_release -cs` nginx" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
$ sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/mysql-5.5
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5

and now use following commands to install Nginx web server, PHP5 with PHP5-FPM and MySQL server.

$ curl http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key | apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nginx php5 php5-fpm  mysql-server php5-mysql

Step 2 — Configure PHP-FPM

PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features.

$ sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

un-comment cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 line and set value to 0.

cgi.fix_pathinfo=0

Now set the listen parameter in /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf configuration file. Here you can use php5-fpm socket to work or start php5-fpm server on any port as service. We are going to use it as service.

$ sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

Now make changes in configuration file as below. Commend listen with socket file and enable it as service

#listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.sock
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000

Step 3 — Download and Configure WordPress

Download latest WordPress archive file from its official website using following command.

$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Extract archive in document root of you domain and update permissions on files.

$ tar xzf latest.tar.gz
$ sudo mv wordpress /var/www/example.com
$ sudo chown -R apache.apache /var/www/example.com
$ sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/example.com

Step 4 — Create MySQL Database and User

After extracting WordPress codebase, Let’s create a mysql database and user account for configuring WordPress. Use following set of command to do it

$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE wp_db;
mysql> GRANT ALL ON wp_db.* to 'wp_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '_secret_password_';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Step 5 — Configure Nginx VirtualHost

Finally do the configuration of Nginx server block (Virtual Host). For this example we are creating a new configuration file for our domain example.com.

$ sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/example.com.conf

and make changes as below.

server {
        listen   80;

        root /var/www/example.com;
        index index.php index.html;
        server_name  example.com www.example.com;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$request_uri;
        }

        error_page 404 /404.html;
        error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
              root /usr/share/nginx/www;
        }

        location ~ .php$ {
                try_files $uri =404;
                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                include fastcgi_params;
        }
}

After installing all services on your system, start all required services.

$ sudo service nginx restart
$ sudo service php5-fpm restart

Step 6 — Start WordPress Web Installer

WordPress provides a web installer for easy to setup WordPress without editing files manually. After completing above steps just point your browser to your domain. Fill the database details and click “Submit