WordPress on LAMP... Linux Shell scripts...

Recently I was installing a WordPress website on Linux server using LAMP. I used WP after a long time and was very impressed by the newer versions. However, the Linux CLI work-flow is kind of demanding, compared to WAMP/XAMPP based installations in Windows. I thought it was a nice opportunity to revisit the unix/linux days: shell scripting ....

Step 1. Installing LAMP

• A standard Ubuntu installation prompts the software selection where one can select the LAMP server.
• It is also possible to access these options by tasksel as below. If you don't have tasksel, it can be installed:

sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel

• It is a good idea to keep a record of the mySQL password, the default user is root.
• As I did not have a GUI and a web browser, I used lynx (a CLI web browser!). Alternatively, one can navigate to the web page from a network computer.

Step 2. Creating a database for the WordPress from mySQL

This is where I thought of creating a bash shell script.

• Created bin directory in my account: mkdir bin | logged out and logged back in that refreshed my .bashrc and updated the $PATH variable.

• Got tired of the mysql -u root -p that you need to enter the mySQL CLI to do the databases. So added an alias in the .bashrc. So now just type go2mysql.

#ratan's aliases

alias go2mysql='mysql -u root -p'

• But to help me create the db, I called an SQL script into a bash shell script as below.

#run_inmysql.sh
!/bin/bash

mysql --host=localhost --user=root --password=mypw -e "source /home/ratan/bin/db_script.sql"

#Source in SQL allows you to run scripts----------------------------------

# db_script.sql----------------------------------not sure what's comment syntax in SQL
CREATE DATABASE myweb DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
GRANT ALL ON myweb.* TO 'ratan'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED by 'mypasswd';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
show databases;

So, that did create the database. I will add rest of my steps to the script and share soon after testing it on my Linux VM. It'd be fun if I can also script into the WP installation!

Feel free to comment should you have queries / advise / or would like to share an alternative way.

Please note that the above is redundant if you have PHPMyAdmin (: sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin :), which offers a GUI via web browser. Here is a nice article. But the good thing about a shell script is that you can fairly automate the process.

I have summarized a major part of the work flow in the following BASH script.

#Ratan's WP installation

site_name='pluto'
myuser='ratan'

cd /tmp
curl -O https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xzvf latest.tar.gz
#mkdir -p $site_name/pg
mkdir $site_name
mv /tmp/wordpress /tmp/$site_name/
mv /tmp/$site_name/wordpress /tmp/$site_name/pg
touch /tmp/$site_name/pg/.htaccess

#move wp-config.php to a directory up
cp /tmp/$site_name/pg/wp-config-sample.php /tmp/$site_name/wp-config.php
mkdir /tmp/$site_name/pg/wp-content/upgrade


#copy to /var/www
sudo mv /tmp/$site_name /var/www/html/$site_name

# Assign ownership set permissions:
sudo chown -R $myuser:www-data /var/www/html
chown -R www-data:www-data your-wordpress-directory

#WordPress Directory Permissions: directory to 755 and files to 644
sudo find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
sudo find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

sudo chmod -R g+w /var/www/html/$site_name/pg/plugins
sudo chmod -R g+w /var/www/html/$site_name/pg/wp-content

cd