If you’re wanting to set up your own blog on Ubuntu, then this is the video for you! In this complete walkthrough, you’ll set up your very own WordPress installation on an Ubuntu cloud instance. This walkthrough will go over launching an instance, setting up a MariaDB database, installing PHP plugins, and by the end of the video you’ll set up a certificate with Let’s Encrypt for a secure connection to your blog. This is a fun project, so definitely check it out!

Thanks to Percona for sponsoring today’s video! Check out the links below to see how they can help you retain support on MySQL 5.7 after its end of life, upgrade to MySQL 8.0, and more!

• Upgrade to MySQL 8.0 or stay on 5.7 (and get support either way)
• Get assistance with migrating to MySQL 8.0
• MySQL 5.7 EOL Support by Percona

Commands used in this video

Below is a list of commands that were used in the video, if you’d like to copy and paste during setup.

Adding a non-root user for yourself

adduser jay

usermod -aG sudo jay

exit

Now that you have a user set up for yourself, be sure to log out and log in as that user before continuing.

Updating the hostname

Edit the following files in order to add your hostname or domain name to your instance.

sudo nano /etc/hostname

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Install updates

Before continuing, we should make sure we have everything up to date to benefit from all current security patches for Ubuntu.

sudo apt update

sudo apt dist-upgrade

Reboot the instance

sudo reboot

Install Apache

sudo apt install apache2

systemctl status apache2

Set up MariaDB

sudo apt install mariadb-server

sudo mariadb

CREATE DATABASE wordpress_db DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

SHOW DATABASES;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress_db.* TO wordpress_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'secret_password';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

EXIT;

Download and Extract WordPress

wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip

sudo apt install unzip

unzip latest.zip

sudo -R chown www-data:www-data wordpress

mv wordpress /var/www

Add a configuration file for WordPress to Apache

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
    <Directory /var/www/wordpress>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride Limit Options FileInfo
        DirectoryIndex index.php
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/wordpress/wp-content>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf

sudo a2ensite wordpress.conf

Install additional required packages

sudo apt install libapache2-mod-php php-curl php-gd php-intl php-mbstring php-mysql php-soap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-zip

sudo a2enmod rewrite

sudo systemctl restart apache2

After all of that, access your site and then fill out form in the web browser. Then, you’re all set!