Hello, friends. With the release of Debian 11, many will take this moment to deploy new personal websites using WordPress. So, in this post, you will learn how to install WordPress on Debian 11.
By way of introduction, WordPress is an open-source CMS (Content Management System) that allows us to deploy a website or a blog quickly but including a lot of advanced features.
In addition to this, we can upload new information from a control panel via a web interface so the ease of administration is complete. It is worth noting that a huge amount of websites are deployed with WordPress, this gives you an idea of how complete it is.
So, let’s get started.
Install WordPress on Debian 11
Install LAMP on Debian 11
As WordPress is a web application created with PHP and requires a database manager like MariaDB, then we can use the LAMP stack for our purpose.
To do so, first read our post about Apache and PHP
How to install Apache on Debian 11?
Also, you will need these PHP modules for WordPress to work at least in a basic way.
php7.4 libapache2-mod-php7.4 php7.4-common php7.4-mbstring php7.4-xmlrpc php7.4-soap php7.4-gd php7.4-xml php7.4-intl php7.4-mysql php7.4-cli php7.4-ldap php7.4-zip php7.4-curl php7.4-zip php7.4-curl
And then complete the LAMP installation with MariaDB.
How to install MariaDB on Debian 11?
Now with MariaDB installed, the next step is to create a new database and MariaDB user dedicated to WordPress. To do this, enter the MariaDB shell
sudo mysql -u root -p
And create the database with the name you want:
CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
After this, create a new user with permissions on the database.
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on wordpress.* TO 'wordpress_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'wordpress_pss123';
You can replace the username and password with any values you want.
Refresh permissions
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
And exit the console
exit;
With this, we have the system ready for WordPress.
Download the WordPress package
The next step is to download the latest stable version of WordPress for Linux. This step will be done from the /tmp folder and using the wget command.
cd /tmp wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz --2021-09-11 17:41:50-- https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz Resolving wordpress.org (wordpress.org)... 198.143.164.252 Connecting to wordpress.org (wordpress.org)|198.143.164.252|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 15087630 (14M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘latest.tar.gz’ latest.tar.gz 100%[=====================================================================================>] 14.39M 10.6MB/s in 1.4s 2021-09-11 17:41:52 (10.6 MB/s) - ‘latest.tar.gz’ saved [15087630/15087630]
When the download is finished, unzip it, move it to the Apache root directory, assign the appropriate permissions and make Apache the owner of the folder so that it will not have any problems running.
tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz sudo mv wordpress/ /var/www/html/ sudo chmod 755 -R /var/www/html/wordpress/ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wordpress/
Next, create a new VirtualHost to better manage the WordPress website
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf
And add the following:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@your_domain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/wordpress
ServerName your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/wordpress>
Options FollowSymlinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your-domain.com_error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your-domain.com_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Replace the ServerName and ServerAdmin values with the appropriate values which are your domain and Admin email.
Save the changes and close the editor.
Now enable the new Apache site and the Apache rewrite module.
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/wordpress.conf sudo a2enmod rewrite
Apply changes by restarting Apache
sudo systemctl restart apache2
Install the Let’s Encrypt certificates
As your site will be on the internet, you should enable HTTPS and for that, you have to generate and install the Let’s Encrypt certificates which we can do with the help of Certbot.
So, install Certbot and the Apache plug-in.
sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache
And generate the certificates, with the following command
sudo certbot --apache -d [your-domain]
Replace [your-domain] with your domain. During the process, you will have to enter an email address and accept the license terms.
Afterward, if the process is successful you will be notified and you can restart Apache and finish the process.
Install WordPress on Debian 11
Now open a web browser and go to https://yourdomain and you will see the following screen starting the installer.
Start by selecting the language of the installation.
Then the installer will notify you of the information needed for installation.
After this, enter the parameters of the created database such as database name, user, and password.
If everything went well, you will see a screen informing you that the process was successful.
Now, enter the information of the website you are creating. Also, on that screen, you will have to create the WordPress administrator user. Then, press the Install WordPress button.
If everything went well, you will see this screen
Now you just need to log in with your credentials.
And see the WordPress dashboard indicating that everything went well.
Enjoy it.
Conclusion
In this post, you have learned how to install WordPress on Debian 11 using Apache as the web server. This process has been done step by step in a way that anyone can do it. Now that you know how to do it, give it a try.
