Installing WordPress on Ubuntu 24.04 with LEMP Stack

WordPress is a free, open-source content management system built with PHP and backed by MySQL or MariaDB, powering over 22% of the top one million websites. This guide walks through installing and configuring WordPress on an Ubuntu 24.04 server running the LEMP stack, which includes Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and PHP, delivering a robust environment for your dynamic websites.

Before you begin, ensure you have access to an Ubuntu 24.04 instance as a non-root sudo user, along with a configured domain A record pointing to your server IP if using a custom domain. The installation process starts by deploying the Nginx web server:

• Install Nginx package: sudo apt install nginx -y
• Start the Nginx service: sudo systemctl start nginx
• Enable Nginx to start automatically on boot: sudo systemctl enable nginx
• Verify the service status: sudo systemctl status nginx

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

The next phase involves configuring the UFW firewall to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic using the Nginx Full profile, reloading the firewall rules to apply changes. Following firewall configuration, you install the MySQL database server package and run the built-in security script to harden your database setup.

You then proceed to create a dedicated MySQL database named wordpressdb and a new user wordpressdbuser with a strong password, granting full privileges on the database and flushing privileges before verifying the database and user creation via the MySQL shell.

The final step requires installing PHP and all required extensions to process dynamic content and communicate with the MySQL database. Using apt, you install packages such as php-fpm, php-mysqli, and php-xml, and verify the installed PHP version to complete the setup.

Source: Dev.to