Install WordPress in Ubuntu 20.04 through apt

WordPress is basically a content management system (CMS). It is written in PHP. Initially, WordPress was just a tool for blogging. But, today it is being used to serve variety of web content. Furthermore, it was first released on May 27, 2003. And, at the time of writing the article the latest stable release of WordPress is 5.4.1. In this article, we would discuss how to install WordPress in Ubuntu 20.04 through apt.

apt – Advanced Package Tool. Besides, we would also like to clarify – at the time of writing, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release has version 5.3.2 in its standard repository.

Note: Following operations would require you to have superuser privileges. In case you don’t have one, then contact your System Administrator for assistance.

Install WordPress in Ubuntu 20.04 through apt

Since the package is already available in standard Ubuntu repository. Therefore, issue the following in terminal –

sudo apt update

It will update the Ubuntu repository to make the latest version of package available. Next, to install WordPress

sudo apt install wordpress

It will install relevant dependencies as well. Major ones include – apache2, mysql-client-8.0, php-mysql, php7.4-cli and wordpress-theme-twentynineteen. It will automatically start apache2.service also.

It is worth mentioning here that, default installation installation directory of WordPress is /usr/share/wordpress (only applicable in case we install WordPress through standard Ubuntu repository). But, for apache server its /var/www/html. So, we need a workaround. Hence, this is where symbolic link steps in. We would therefore create a symbolic link of /usr/share/wordpress pointing to /var/www/. We will explain it later why just /var/www/ and why not /var/www/html. Issue the following in terminal –

sudo ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/ /var/www/wordpress

Thereafter, we need to install mysql-server

sudo apt install mysql-server

In next step, create a MySQL database and hostname. It is always better to use database name similar to your hostname. Syntax

sudo bash /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n <database_name> <hostname>

For instance,

sudo bash /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n wordpress localhost

Here, a database – wordpress and hostname – localhost is now available for use. It would return with the following –

Goto http://localhost to setup WordPress

Lastly, open a browser and type the following in address bar –

http://localhost/wordpress

This won’t work in most cases and will throw 404 error. By default, DocumentRoot entry for apache server is /var/www/html. Therefore, we need to change it to make our configuration work –

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

and, edit the entry –

DocumentRoot /var/www/html

to

DocumentRoot /var/www/

Next, restart apache2.service

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Lastly, in the browser –

http://localhost/wordpress

It will come up WordPress installation process. It will ask you to login in next stage.

There would be another issue while you update WordPress themes and plugins. To resolve that, we need to change the ownership of following folder/subfolder to www-data. It is done through chown command-line utility with -R (recursive) option.

chown -R www-data /usr/share/wordpress

In conclusion, we have discussed how to install WordPress in Ubuntu 20.04 through apt.

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