Install WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04

Nothing special here except PHP: WordPress requires PHP 7.3 or newer, which isn’t in the default Ubuntu 18.04 repositories. So this post is mostly about compiling a recent PHP. Step by step:

1. Install the required packages:

   apt-get update
   # general applications
   apt-get install vim pwgen nginx mysql-server certbot
   # required for the build
   apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libxml2-dev sqlite3 libsystemd libsystemd-dev libcurl4 libcurl4-openssl-dev libpng-dev libonig-dev libzip-dev

2. Build and install PHP:

   mkdir -p ~/temp && cd ~/temp
   wget https://www.php.net/distributions/php-7.4.5.tar.gz
   tar -xzf php-7.4.5.tar.gz && cd php-7.4.5
   ./configure --enable-fpm --with-mysqli --with-fpm-systemd --with-zip --enable-soap --with-xmlrpc --enable-mbstring --enable-intl --with-curl --enable-gd
   make
   make install
   cp php.ini-production /usr/local/php/php.ini
   cp /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf.default /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
   cp sapi/fpm/php-fpm /usr/local/bin
   cp sapi/fpm/php-fpm.service /etc/systemd/system/php-fpm.service
   systemctl daemon-reload
   systemctl start php-fpm

3. Download WordPress:

   cd /var/www
   wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
   tar -xzf latest.tar.gz

4. Configure nginx, PHP-FPM and MySQL – see the official documentation below.

Links

• https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/recipes/wordpress/
• https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.nginx.php
• https://wordpress.org/support/article/how-to-install-wordpress