Introduction
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install WordPress on a freshly created instance. I’ll demonstrate the installation on an Ubuntu 14.04 server. These instructions may also work on older versions of Ubuntu and Debian.
So, let’s start.
Step One: Update existing packages
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Step Two: Install Nginx
Nginx is a high-performance lightweight web server designed with the purpose of delivering large amounts of static content with efficient use of system resources. In contrast to Apache, Nginx uses an asynchronous event-driven model which provides more predictable performance under load.
Let’s add a third-party repository to install the latest version of Nginx (1.6.1).
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
add-apt-repository -y ppa:rtcamp/nginx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx
service nginx start
Now, let’s test if the server is up and running.
http://YOUR-VPS-IP
It should take you to Nginx’s default landing page.
Step Three: Install PHP 5.5
PHP is a widely used open-source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.
Let’s install the latest version of PHP on our server.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5-common php5-mysqlnd php5-xmlrpc php5-curl php5-gd php5-cli php5-fpm php-pear php5-dev php5-imap php5-mcrypt
If you want to check your PHP version, run the following command:
php -v
You will see something like this.
PHP 5.5.16-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 (cli) (built: Aug 25 2014 10:24:59)
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies
withZendOPcache v7.0.4-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2014, by Zend Technologies
Now, we’ll make a slight configuration change to make our setup more secure. Open the main php5-fpm configuration file with root privileges:
sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini
Press Ctrl+W and search for cgi.fix_pathinfo=. Uncomment it (delete 
and change 1 to 0. After changes, the line should look like this:
cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
Save (Ctrl+O) and close the file (Ctrl+X).
Now, we just need to restart our PHP processor by typing:
sudo service php5-fpm restart
Step Four: Install MySQL
To store and manage databases, we need to install MySQL. You can easily install it by typing the following in the console:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
During the installation process, you will be asked to set a root password for MySQL. Once you have set the root password, we will have to tell MySQL to generate the directory structure where it will store databases.
sudo mysql_install_db
Let’s finish it up by running a security script that will modify some default insecurities.
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Just type the MySQL root password and type n if you don’t want to change it. After that, type y for every question.
Set Timezone (conditional)
By default, the timezone of your server is UTC. If you’re living in a different timezone, you can change it by typing in the following command:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
At this point, your LEMP server is up and running.
Step Five: Configuring Nginx to serve WordPress
Let’s start our WordPress installation by creating an Nginx server block for our site.
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/wordpress
Paste the following code there:
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/wordpress;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name domain.com;
error_page 404 /404.html;
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
}
location / {
# try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location = /favicon.ico {
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
expires max;
}
location = /robots.txt {
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
}
# Cache Static Files For As Long As Possible
location ~*
\.(ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|css|rss|atom|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$
{
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
expires max;
}
# Security Settings For Better Privacy Deny Hidden Files
location ~ /\. {
deny all;
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
}
# Return 403 Forbidden For readme.(txt|html) or license.(txt|html)
if ($request_uri ~* "^.+(readme|license)\.(txt|html)$") {
return 403;
}
# Disallow PHP In Upload Folder
location /wp-content/uploads/ {
location ~ \.php$ {
deny all;
}
}
}
This is a well-tuned WordPress configuration file with permalink support. Save (Ctrl+O) and close the file (Ctrl+X). Let’s enable the server block by symlinking:
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/wordpress /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/wordpress
Next, we’ll delete the Nginx default server block.
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
Now, we’ll tune the main Nginx configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Make sure that the number of worker processes is equal to the number of cores in your instance.
user www-data;
worker_processes 1;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
Add use epoll; to the events block.
events {
worker_connections 4096;
multi_accept on;
use epoll;
}
Add client_max_body_size and server_tokens off directive. Set keepalive_timeout to 30 seconds.
##
# Basic Settings
##
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 30;
types_hash_max_size 2048;
server_tokens off;
client_max_body_size 100m;
# server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
# server_name_in_redirect off;
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
Make sure that the whole Gzip settings block looks like this:
##
# Gzip Settings
##
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
Save (Ctrl+O) and close the file (Ctrl+X). Then restart the server:
sudo service nginx restart
Step Six: Configure PHP
If you want to upload files of more than 2mb to your WordPress site, you have to increase the PHP upload size variables in php.ini.
sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini
Now, press Ctrl+W search for “upload_max_filesize” and set it to 100m.
upload_max_filesize=100M
Do the same with post_max_size. post_max_size needs to be the same size or larger than upload_max_filesize.
post_max_size=100M
Restart PHP.
sudo service php5-fpm restart
Step Seven: Setting up the MySQL database
In this step, we’ll create the database user and tables. Go ahead and log into the MySQL shell:
mysql -u root -p
Log in using your MySQL root password. We will need to create a WordPress database, along with a user in the database. First, let’s make the database (feel free to give it whatever name you like):
CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
After that, we need to create a new user. Please replace the database, name, and password with whatever you prefer:
CREATE USER wordpressuser@localhost;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Set a password for your new user:
SET PASSWORD FOR wordpressuser@localhost= PASSWORD("password");
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Finish up by granting all privileges to the new user. Without this command, the WordPress installer will not be able to start up:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO wordpressuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Then refresh MySQL:
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Exit the MySQL shell:
exit
Step Eight: Installing the WordPress files
We’re almost done. Let’s proceed to install WordPress.
First, navigate to the site root directory:
mkdir /var/www/
cd /var/www/
Now, download the latest version of WordPress:
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
Extract it from the archive:
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
Give the permissions of /var/www/wordpress to the www-data user. It will allow future automatic updating of WordPress plugins and file editing with SFTP.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress/
sudo usermod -a -G www-data www-data
You’re done! Your new WordPress site is now ready. Just navigate to your website and finish the installation.