Installing Wordpress on Nginx (Ubuntu tutorial)

Last update: 04-21-2024

Why Nginx for Apache?

Apache is often the go-to choice for deploying WordPress due to its widespread use, ease of configuration, and strong compatibility with WordPress's requirements.

However, Nginx is a viable alternative and offers its own set of advantages. Nginx is known for its high performance, particularly in handling a large number of concurrent connections, which can lead to faster web page loading times. Additionally, Nginx has a reputation for efficient resource usage, which can be beneficial for servers with limited resources.

Its ability to handle static content efficiently and its reverse proxy features also make Nginx a strong contender for WordPress hosting, especially in high-traffic scenarios or for dynamic websites with complex caching requirements.

Updating the package list

We start by updating the package list:

sudo apt update

PHP, MySQL and Nginx installation

Notice that when deploying on Ubuntu using Nginx, `php-fpm` (PHP FastCGI Process Manager) is used instead of the standard PHP module because Nginx does not embed PHP processing within itself.

Unlike Apache, which can process PHP internally using a module like `mod_php`, Nginx serves as a reverse proxy and requires an external processor to handle PHP files. `php-fpm` provides this functionality by acting as a FastCGI server for PHP scripts, allowing Nginx to communicate with it for processing PHP code.

This setup enhances performance and scalability, as `php-fpm` can handle multiple PHP processes concurrently, making it more suitable for high-traffic websites.

sudo apt install php-fpm php-mysql mysql-server nginx unzip

Configuring Nginx to work with PHP

Let's now replace Nginx's 'default' configuration

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
sudo rm default
sudo nano default

We can then paste in the following configuration to the newly created empty file:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your_server_domain_or_IP;

    root /var/www/html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    location ~ .php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Restarting Nginx

We need to restart Nginx for the new configuration to take effect

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

Removing the default index.html page

cd /var/www/html
sudo rm index.nginx-debian.html

Downloading Wordpress to the Ubuntu server

While still in the /var/www/html folder, let's download WordPress from wordpress.org:

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

Extracting the contents of the Wordpress archive

sudo unzip latest.zip

Deleting the WordPress zip archive

sudo rm latest.zip

Moving WordPress to the server's root folder

sudo mv wordpress/* .

Changing the owner of the Wordpress files

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data *

Securing MySQL installation

To improve the security of MySQL, it's recommended to run the mysql_secure_installation script:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Answer 'yes' to all of the questions, and choose '2' as the required password strength.

Creating the database and a database user

We first need to start MySQL:

sudo mysql

Then, we can create the database for WordPress:

CREATE DATABASE wordpress_db;

And a database user:

CREATE USER 'wordpress_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'P@55word';

Make sure that you replace the password with something a bit more secure!

We then need to grant privileges to the user on the databse:

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

We can then quite from MySQL

quit