WordPress Installation

Description

This page describes just how easy it is to setup WordPress on an existing Linux server - at least it was for me.  In essence, its a download, configure, run.  Its one of the easiest things I have ever installed.  Now granted, thats because I already had an "enterprise" MySQL server that all my sites use, and already had a webserver with PHP configured.  So connecting those dots was no big deal, and thats what I describe here.  For anyone interested in how to leverage WordPress thats hosted on another site - thats covered in plenty of other places.  And for anyone else thats looking for how to do a combination MySQL/Linux/Apache/WordPress - I'd recomment a VM Appliance thats already setup.

Note : please see the bottom of the page for the full size images - these are just thumbnails in the actual documentation.  Clicking on the image name will give full size view to the options.

Process/Implementation

So this is really straightforward - and WordPress has a great section on their own site that covers things you need for the installation, things you need to do to complete the installation, and their "Famous 5 minute installation".   So in essence, this is me summarizing the steps I used from those links, and updates/changes I had to do for my own personal installation.

Here are the steps :

1. Login to your webserver via putty or whatever ssh client you use (ssh-l www webhost)
   
2. Be sure you're the www user, which for me is the linux user that owns most of my web content.  In your case, use whatever you use for web content ownership.
   
3. Change to the /tmp directory (cd /tmp)
4. Download the WordPress software from their site and put the file into /tmp on your linux server.   (I personally like the tar.gz file and wget to get it, so I use "wget --output-document=/tmp/latest.tar.gz http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz" to do this).
   
5. Change directory to the root of your web share, basically your DocumentRoot.  Note that for me, I already have an existing site, I dont want to lose that content - instead I just want to add WordPress functionality to it - so I use a subdirectory design.  If you are setting up a new site, and want WordPress to be the root, just use the DocumentRoot itself.  So for me, its a subdirectory (cd /usr/local/apache/htdocs)
   
6. Decompress and untar the file (gunzip -d -c /tmp/latest.zip | tar -xvf -)
   
7. Change into the new wordpress directory (cd wordpress)
   
8. Create a WordPress database in your MySQL database server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.  This is covered in many other places, but in my personal case, I have phpMyAdmin configured on my MySQL server, so I just built a new database and user to go with it - a very simple step via phpMyAdmin.  Note that WordPress has documented this in detail.
   
9. Since we're already in the wordpress directory on the server, simply copy the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php. (cp -p wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php)
10. Open wp-config.php and edit for your own database details (which they document very well on their site)
11. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser - for me that was http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.

That's it! WordPress is now installed.  You should see screens like this - note these are taken from the WordPress site, but looked the same for me :

Tuning / Customization

At this point, you should have a completed WordPress installation.  The best view of whats next can be seen right on the WordPress site - in their first steps document.  Note that I didnt know this, so I learned the hard way - but now I know its all right here, for those that want the easy way.

Now you can adjust the look and feel of it, using themes.  Themes are nothing short of awesome !  In one click, you can COMPLETELY change the look and feel of your site.  As long as you have them downloaded, and placed into the themes directory, its simply a click away.  WordPress comes with some default themes, so you'll have a few to play with, but there are many, many, many more out there for download.

Beyond that, its up to you - thats as far as I have gone so far.  I've not yet played with photo-blogging or any of the other extensions.  I've been quite pleased with just this - and think it adds a nice slick set of functionality to any site, and lets non html-savvy users become web contributors.