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
# 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.
Originally published at https://blog.vimarsh.info.