Setting Up WordPress on a VPS

This post goes over how to setup WordPress on a VPS. This is sort-of a cumulative post which incorporates lots of little tutorials I’ve done and lots of new best-practices I have learned through trial and error.

If you’re following my posts in general, you may have noticed that I already did this. I made a mistake while using a beta tool which caused me to need to start over, and my many posts documenting the processes had become fragmented so I figured it was time to do a sort of roll-up mega-post.

Step One: Build LAMP Stack

The first step is to create a VPS. I use DigitalOcean (Referral Link for two months free) because it is cheap, reliable, and easy to use. It takes less than a minute to create a VPS and there are lots of OS options. In this case I chose the most current version of Debian, Version 8.6 amd64.

Once the vm is set up, we need to connect via SSH. I am using Windows 10, so I will be using putty which is a great, free option. Once you setup a VPS, DigitalOcean will send you an email with your ip and credentials. Use those to log in via SSH.

Right out of the box, we need to make sure everything is up to date on the new machine;

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

The first thing I like to do is install fail2ban so that I know no one can bruteforce my SSH password.

apt-get install -y fail2ban

Easy enough. The next step is to install Apache.

apt-get install -y apache2

Now install and configure MySQL. Make sure to pick a good password and only allow connections from localhost when it asks.

apt-get -y install mysql-server
mysql_secure_installation

Next we install PHP

apt-get -y install php5 php-pear php5-mysql

As well as a few add-ons that our tools will need;

apt-get install php5-mcrypt
php5enmod mcrypt
a2enmod rewrite
apt-get install php5-curl

If you are planning on using any MSSQL connections, use this;
apt-get install freetds-common freetds-bin unixodbc php5-sybase

Restart Apache to make everything take effect…
service apache2 restart

Now create a test page by opening a new file in the web root:

nano /var/www/info.php

Add the following code and Ctrl-X to exit.

<?php echo phpinfo(); ?>

If you see something like this, we are done setting up the LAMP stack and ready to move on…

Step Two: Setup Email

Postfix is a great, free option that enables the server to send emails reliably.

The first step is to block non-local requests to send emails.

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -j REJECT -p tcp --dport 25

Then install Postfix and associated tools:

apt-get -y install postfix
apt-get -y install mailutils

Now edit the config files and change the interface to loopback-only like so;

nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

Find this line;

inet_interfaces =

And change to;

inet_interfaces = 127.0.0.1

Now edit the email aliases;

nano /etc/aliases

At the end of the file, make sure there is a line that starts with root and ends with your email, like so;

root email@domain.com

Save the file and exit. Then run newaliases to let Postfix apply the changes.

Restarting Postfix is not enough because we changed the interfaces line in the config file. We need to stop and start it like so;

postfix stop
postfix start

Step Three: Create New VirtualHost

First lets create a new directory for our install. Substitute your fqdn;

mkdir /var/www/[fqdn]/

Now we make a new virtualhost conf file with this command. Again, substitute your fqdn;

cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/[fqdn].conf

Then edit the file with nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/[fqdn].conf

It needs to contain the following;

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName [fqdn]

	ServerAdmin your_email@website.com
	DocumentRoot /var/www/[fqdn]/

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Activate the new virtualhost with a2ensite [fqdn]

Restart apache with service apache2 restart

Step Four: Setup WordPress

Download the latest version of WordPress from their website. Then upload the files to the appropriate directory which we created above. Then we need to change the ownership and permissions of the directory;

chown www-data:www-data /var/www/ -R
chmod 775 /var/www/ -R

Navigate to the web url, and you will be guided through the setup process to get wordpress connected to the database we setup earlier.