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Fastest way to install WordPress

·3 mins

I will be showing you the fastest way to install a fully functional WordPress website with an auto-renewing free SSL certificate in less than 3 commands. Let’s get started.

Prerequisites #

Make sure you are using Linux or Mac for installing WordPress. If you are deploying a website you might be using a virtual machine in the cloud for the same. Stay tuned for another post on how you can get 2 free VMs forever on Oracle Cloud

We will be using an open-source tool called Easyengine for installing and managing WordPress

EasyEngine makes it greatly easy to manage Nginx, fast web-server software that consumes little memory when handling increasing volumes of concurrent users.

Let’s get started #

SSH into the VM #

You can use Putty / Powershell or Terminal to SSH into the VM

Also, make sure to update installed packages by running sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Install EasyEngine #

Run the command

# Install EasyEngine on Linux
wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee4 && sudo bash ee

# If installing EasyEngine on Mac for Local Development 
brew install easyengine

To install WordPress website run the command #

sudo ee site create website.com

You can change the username & password of the WordPress install for security when you first open the website.

Make sure to change website.com with your domain name

I also recommend setting up Redis cache for a better performant website ee site create example.com –type=wp –mu=subdir –cache. Easyengine automatically creates the database, sets up secure username and passwords as well. Making the whole process super easy.

Currently Easyengine does not support running without root privileges.

You can check out further options here

Pointing the domain name to the server #

Make sure you point your domain name to the server’s IP Address

Go to nameserver provider and set A record for your server.

DNS Propogation might take time

Registering a SSL certificate #

To get auto-renewing free SSL certificate run

sudo ee site update website.com

This will install an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt and change necessary database entries for HTTPS. The certificate also auto-renews 1 month before the expiry

This might not work properly with Cloudflare

And that is all. You have a fully functional WordPress website with auto-renewing SSL certificate. You can go to the WordPress admin panel example.com/wp-admin and start customizing.

And you can also create more websites on the same instance

Some other Useful Commands
#

Make sure to run with root privileges. You can use sudo su to run all following commands as root

Installing PhPMyAdmin #

Easyengine gives the option to enable PhPMyAdmin and other admin tools

To use that run

ee admin-tools enable example.com

By default, http authentication will be enabled. To view the username & password run ee auth list global

Then you can go to example.com/ee-admin to see available tools.

source: EasyEngine

With the Database name, username & password now you can hence login to PHPMyAdmin

Deleting a website #

To delete a website simply run

ee site delete example.com

Restarting Docker Containers #

Sometimes due to some bug or high traffic, Nginx may crash: you can simply restart the containers by running

# Restart all containers of site 
$ ee site restart example.com 

# Restart single container of site 
$ ee site restart example.com

Those were just some of the things you can do with EasyEngine, it is a very powerful tool: easy and quick. They have every command laid out well documented on their website.

EasyEngine Github