How to configure WordPress in Linux

WordPress is a widely-used platform for creating websites and blogs. It is a versatile content management system (CMS) that encourages many individuals, corporations, and organizations to customize, and publish digital content easily.

Development using WordPress

WordPress development involves creating and customizing websites, themes, and plugins using the WordPress platform. It allows developers to use frameworks and languages like PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build dynamic and feature-rich websites.

Setting up WordPress on Linux

Here, we will walk through how to configure a WordPress site on your Linux terminal:

Note: You are advised to follow these instructions step-by-step to get your WordPress website up and running.

Installing LAMP stack

  1. Firstly, open your terminal and update the package list:

sudo apt update
  1. Now, you will install the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack with the following command:

sudo apt install apache2 mysql-server php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

Configuring MySQL

  1. Now, you will secure the MySQL installation by running this command:

sudo mysql_secure_installation
  1. This is an important step. Here, you will create a MySQL database and user for WordPress by putting in your credentials:

sudo mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE wordpresss;
CREATE USER 'wordpresss'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpresss.* TO 'wordpresss'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;EXIT;

Configuring WordPress

  1. Now, you will download and extract the latest version of WordPress using these commands:

cd /tmp
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz
  1. Here, you will move the extracted files to the Apache web root directory /var/www/html/.

sudo mv wordpress/* /var/www/html/
  1. Now, you will create a WordPress configuration file using these commands:

cd /var/www/html/
sudo mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
sudo nano wp-config.php

In this, you will update the database settings with the database name, user, and password you created earlier.

  1. Finally, you will set proper ownership and permissions with this command:

sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/

Completing WordPress installation

Once you have followed the aforementioned steps, now we will display the working:

  1. We open a web browser and navigate to our server’s IP address or domain name.

  2. We select our preferred language, using English (United States) for convenience.

  1. Moving on, we will be taken to a page asking us for the database connection details.

  1. Next, we will be taken to a page asking us to enter the site title, username, password, and email. For security reasons, we aren't displaying it. We will click on "Install WordPress" to install it.

We have successfully launched and configured WordPress on our Linux system.

Accessing WordPress dashboard

We can access the WordPress dashboard by opening a web browser and navigating to our domain or server IP address. We will see a page asking us to Log in using the username and password we set during installation.

After logging in, we will see our dashboard. Now, we have our first running WordPress website and can customize and publish our content for the public.

Conclusion

In conclusion, WordPress is a powerful tool that allows individuals and businesses to create and manage websites effortlessly. WordPress offers the flexibility to bring online presence to life, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce platforms for developers and content creators. Following this step-by-step approach, you can easily set up WordPress on your Linux Ubuntu system and create your digital content.

Free Resources

Copyright ©2025 Educative, Inc. All rights reserved