Setting up a LAMP server for WordPress 2022

This tutorial has been updated for 2022.

In this tutorial we will walk-through the process of installing Apache, MySql, and PHP on an Ubuntu 22.04 DigitalOcean Droplet. The server created here will eventually host a WordPress website, I will indicate when settings are specific to WordPress and you can alternate from there if you are doing something different. These directions are for DigitalOcean but should be similar for most VPS providers. Before starting this process you should obtain an Ubuntu 22.04 droplet from DigitalOcean, a ‘Basic’ Droplet with 2GB of memory should suffice for a basic low-traffic website and you can scale up from there in the future if you need to. In addition to obtaining the droplet, you should configure the server for SSH access. If you need assistance with that, DigitalOcean has articles about configuring new droplets and about adding SSH keys to existing droplets.

Installing the LAMP apps

‘LAMP’ refers to the ‘stack’ we will be using to build our server. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP. There are other stacks that can be used, but for WordPress websites the two most common stacks are LAMP or LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySql, PHP). I would recommend sticking with one of these two stacks since most documentation you find will reference one of the two (LAMP seems to be more common than LEMP from my own observations).

By starting out with a Linux (Ubuntu) server from DigitalOcean we already have the ‘L’ for our ‘LAMP’ server, now we’ll move onto the ‘A’. Apache is the most common web server in use with WordPress websites, and the one we’ll be using for this tutorial. To begin with we’ll need to download and install Apache onto our server. The first step is to make sure you can connect to your web-server over SSH or through the ‘Droplet Console’.

Installing Apache

Once you are connected to your server, the first thing you should do is check for updates and then run any updates. You will check for updates with the following command:

sudo apt update

Once that is done checking, we’ll run the waiting updates with

sudo apt upgrade

If you are asked to confirm any updates, just go with ‘yes’ or whatever default is already checked. Since it is a new server there are no settings we need to worry about preserving.

With the server updated we can get Apache installed. We’ll run this command to download it

sudo apt install apache2

And once that is completed you can navigate to the IP address of the server in your web browser and should be greeted with the Apache2 Default Page. There is still some work to be done in order to get Apache to properly serve up a webpage. But this is all we need for now, we’ll create a VirtualHost file and configure it on a later step.

sudo ufw enable apache

sudo systemctl restart ufw.service

Installing MySql

Next up for our LAMP is the ‘M’, MySql. MySql is a Database application that help us organize our content for our future website. There are many database options, but MySql is the most common for WordPress so that is what we’ll use here.

First up is to download the mysql-server app by running

sudo apt install mysql-server

Once MySql is downloaded we should go through the initial setup. Run this command to have MySql walk you through the initial settings

mysql_secure_installation

You will be prompted through a series of questions, the first should be if you would like to enforce password strength requirements (I recommend yes). Next you will be prompted to define a ‘root’ password, make sure you copy this down you will most likely need it in the future (not this tutorial but in general). After you set the password you will be asked to remove anonymous users, you should. You should also disallow remote root logins, and finally go ahead and reload the privilege tables when prompted which updates the currently logged in accounts to match the new settings.

After that we are done with MySql for now.

Installing PHP

The final piece of our LAMP server is the ‘P’, for PHP. PHP is a programming scripting language that WordPress and many other web applications are built on. Since this tutorial is about getting WordPress installed we’ll be installing PHP and some additional necessary add-ons for WordPress.

sudo apt install php php-mysql php-curl php-gd php-mbstring php-xml php-xmlrpc php-soap php-intl php-zip

These are some of the commonly needed PHP extensions for WordPress. It’s possible that you may need other extensions for particular WordPress plugins, make sure to check your documentation.

Configuring the LAMP apps

Now that the we have all the necessary applications installed for our LAMP stack, we need to complete configuring them for serving up a WordPress website. In order to complete these steps you will want to have a URL already registered (a website name like resettech.net, or www.google.com), and the DNS for that URL pointing to our DigitalOcean droplet. From here on out the URL will be referred to as the FQDN (fully qualified domain name).

Configuring the MySql database

The first thing we will do is setup a MySql database for WordPress and then create a user for WordPress to use to access that database. In this section there are three variables that you will need to determine, the name of the database, the username you want for the database user, and then what password do you want for that user. I will be using the WordPress defaults (except for the password which I will make up) for the variables here, but you may want to update them to something else depending on your use case. In this example and future documentation we’ll assume the MySql database is named ‘wordpress’, the database user is ‘wp_user’, and the password is ‘NotMyPassword123’.

From your server terminal connect to the MySql application by typing in

sudo mysql -u root

If you are prompted for a password, it is looking for your Ubuntu ‘Sudo’ password.

Next we will create a database in MySql named ‘wordpress’ and then set the Character Set and Collate options to utf8 which is what WordPress needs.

CREATE DATABASE wordpress DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Then we will create a user that WordPress can use to access the database. For this command you will need to replace the password variable at the end of the statement with your own password.

CREATE USER 'wp_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'NotMyPassword123';

This creates a user named wp_user and only allows that account to connect to the database Locally, which prevents someone from connecting to the database remotely using that account. It then sets the user’s password to ‘NotMyPassword123’. The mysql_native_password modifier tells MySql to create the user with the older, less secure, password hashing format that is necessary for WordPress as of right now.

Next we will grant permission for the user account we just made to access the database.

GRANT ALL ON wordpress.* TO 'wp_user'@'localhost';

For the final MySql steps we will reset the user permissions and then exit the MySql interface and return to the Ubuntu terminal using the following commands

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Now you should be back in the regular Ubuntu terminal. Next we’ll be creating our Apache VirtualHost file which directs traffic to our WordPress files to serve up our WordPress content.

Creating an Apache VirtualHost

In order to configure Apache for WordPress we will create a new VirtualHost file, enable that VirtualHost, check our Apache setup for errors and then enable the new Apache configuration.

First thing is to create a new VirtualHost file for the website. The file can be named whatever you want it to be, as long as it ends with the .conf suffix. I prefer to use the name of the website to keep it simple. For our example I will be using resettech.net as the FQDN, so I will be calling the VirtualHost file resettech.conf.

sudo touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/resettech.conf

Next we will fill the content of the VirtualHost file by opening it with a text editor. Personally I like to use vim, but nano works just as well if that’s what you are familiar with. Use this command to open the VirtualHost file, replace vim with the text editor of choice if you’d like to use something different, and make sure you replace resettech.conf with your VirtualHost conf file.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/resettech.conf

Now we will create the VirtualHost content. I’m including a basic VirtualHost example below that can be copy and pasted. However there are several variables that need to be edited to work with your respective website. In the top section the ‘ServerAdmin’ email should be replaced with an active email address and the ‘ServerName’ and ‘ServerAlias’ variables should be replaced with your FQDN (ie: resettech.net and www.resettech.net).

The other variable you need to define is the path to your WordPress installation (the DocumentRoot and Directory variables in the example below). Since we have not downloaded or installed WordPress yet (covered in a later step), we’ll go ahead and use the location we will be installing WordPress to later /var/www/wordpress. It is possible to install WordPress to another location, but it is best practice to install your public web files in /var/www and the WordPress default location is /var/www/wordpress. In my experience the only time you should consider using a different path for the installation is if you expect to run multiple WordPress websites off of one server.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin  admin@resettech.net
ServerName   resettech.net
ServerAlias  www.resettech.net
DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress

 <Directory /var/www/wordpress/>
  Options FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  Require all granted
 </Directory>

 <IfModule mod_dir.c>
  DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl  index.xhtml index.htm
 </IfModule>

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

Once we have our VirtualHost file created we need to tell Apache to enable that VirtualHost. (replace resettech.conf with your apache VirtualHost filename)

sudo a2ensite resettech.conf

Then we need to disable the default VirtualHost file that Apache comes with.

sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf

Before proceeding further you can check the syntax of your Apache Virtualhost file by running this command. You will get a warning that the current DocumentRoot folder does not exist. That is correct, but we will be creating that folder in a later step. If you see any additional errors, they will need to be corrected before moving on.

sudo apache2ctl configtest

Now we will enable the rewrite module in Apache that is required for WordPress.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

And finally we will restart Apache to apply the new settings.

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

At this point we are now ready to install WordPress.

Installing WordPress

For the final step in getting WordPress installed on our DigitalOcean LAMP VPS we need to install WordPress.

Download and unpack WordPress

To download WordPress, we will first navigate to the /tmp folder on the server and then download

cd /tmp
curl -O https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

WordPress comes downloaded in a compressed form (tar.gz) so we will unpack it with tar and leave it in it’s own folder in /tmp

tar xzvf latest.tar.gz -C /tmp/.

With that you will have a new /tmp/wordpress folder and all the WordPress files and folders are in there. Now we will create a couple of files that are necessary for WordPress and make a copy of one that WordPress provides a template for.

sudo touch /tmp/wordpress/.htaccess
sudo mkdir /tmp/wordpress/wp-content/upgrade
sudo cp /tmp/wordpress/wp-config-sample.php /tmp/wordpress/wp-config.php

WordPress config file

Now that we have copied the WordPress wp-config.php template we need to do a bit of setup and configure it to talk to the MySql database that we created previously. For this you will need to know the WordPress database name, and the username and password we created in the previous steps. I will continue to use ‘wordpress’, ‘wp_user’, and ‘NotMyPassword123’.

Open wp-config.php with a text editor

sudo vim /tmp/wordpress/wp-config.php

From there we’ll begin replacing things, first thing is the MySql database name, wordpress. Find the line: define( ‘DB_NAME’, ’’ ), and then add your database name between the ticks, so that it matches below.

define( 'DB_NAME', 'wordpress );

Next we’ll do the same with the MySql database user we created, wp_user. Scroll down wp-config.php and find the matching define( ‘DB_USER, ‘’), then edit it to match as below.

define( 'DB_USER', 'wp_user );

And we’ll do the same with the MySql user password, NotMyPassword123, we created earlier as well. Find the matching line and replace edit it with the actual password

define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'NotMyPassword123' );

With that done we need to do one more thing for wp-config and that is download the Salts. Salts are what WordPress uses to cryptographically randomize yours and your users passwords when they are stored in memory. To do this, save your current changes in wp-config.php, and close it. Then from the command line run the command below and copy the output so we can past it into our wp-config.php file.

curl -s https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

With the salt contents copied, we will reopen the wp-config.php file one more time in our text editor

sudo vim /tmp/wordpress/wp-config.php

And then scroll down till you find the following section

define( 'AUTH_KEY',         'put your unique phrase here' );
define( 'SECURE_AUTH_KEY',  'put your unique phrase here' );
define( 'LOGGED_IN_KEY',    'put your unique phrase here' );
define( 'NONCE_KEY',        'put your unique phrase here' );
define( 'AUTH_SALT',        'put your unique phrase here' );
define( 'SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here' );
define( 'LOGGED_IN_SALT',   'put your unique phrase here' );
define( 'NONCE_SALT',       'put your unique phrase here' );

Delete these 8 lines and replace them with the salt contents you copied earlier and then save the changes to wp-config.php.

Copying WordPress to its proper location

Our WordPress files are now ready to be copied to our live location. In the previous step when setting up our Apache VirtuaHost file we defined a DocumentRoot location, that is where you need to copy the WordPress files to. The command should look something like this

sudo cp -a /tmp/wordpress/. /var/www/wordpress

Once the files have been copied we need to update them to have the correct permissions. Run the following commands to update the permissions.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/wordpress/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/wordpress/
sudo find /var/www/wordpress/ -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;
sudo find /var/www/wordpress/ -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;
sudo find /var/www/wordpress/ -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;

Now you should be able to navigate to your domain in your web browser and see the WordPress welcome page. You should go ahead and complete the new website setup on your website before moving on the last step.

Installing wp-cli

wp-cli is a tool for managing WordPress from the terminal. I use it to manage WordPress when the web interface is inaccessible and to apply bulk changes to the MySQL database after a server migration. You can find more information on the wp-cli website.

Download the wp-cli app

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

Make the wp-cli app executable

sudo chmod +x wp-cli.phar

Move the app to the proper location for the app to be run by all users.

mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

That’s it. You are now up and running with the latest version of WordPress and the wp-cli tool installed. From here you can start adding content to your website, or you may want to continue on to installing a SSL certificate to get your website on HTTPS.