You can create a WordPress site in a Virtual Machine and Make a Template of It!
Setting up WordPress can be straight forward, and it can be confusing. This depends on the guide, & the depths that you go to when setting it up.
These are the two sets of guides I referenced in setting up WordPress on my Pimox. I like referencing multiple guides. They all leave something out, add something extra in, etc. Multiple guides help me understand what is going on and maybe finding a feature in one guide that I can’t find in the other guides.
I say sets of guides because WordPress runs on a Linux, Apache, MySQL Python stack or LAMP stack. With these guides you get to setup the Apache web server & Python first, MySQL second and WordPress third.
Once I get a working VM, just before configuration while the slate is still clean, I create a VM template or image of the sd card before moving on. That way I only have to set it up once.
Resources:
Building an Apache Web Server with php – https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-apache/
Skip testing php, if you want
Skip setting up an Apache Virtual Host. It creates a virtual host you have to learn how to get rid of later.
Adding sql https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-mysql/
Skip adding a user and table, we will do that with the WordPress tutorial.
Finally, putting WordPress on top of the stack using the Pi My Life Up WordPress Guide
There are a couple big banks of code you can grab and run as a batch. The first time I like to grab each command separately and watch what it does.
If you want to install using Ubuntu & with a more granular approach, use Digital Ocean’s guides: LAMP Stack & WordPress
Following the Digital Ocean instructions first, I ran into issues with Mysql on the ubuntu stack. I couldn’t log into mysql as root after securing the msql server. It kept saying root was set to no login, though it was set to have a login with a password. Instead of fixing it, I just moved on to the other guide. Running and spinning up Virtual Machines is sometimes easier and more fun than troubleshooting, so I moved to Debian which works with the pimylifeup.com instructions.
To lock down a certificate, either put nginx or traefik in front of it and have those grab the cert, or put the cert to the server:
Pi My Life Up -Raspberry Pi SSL Let’s Encrypt
Digital Ocean – How to secure apache with let’s encrypt on Ubuntu
Note – I’ve had problems with htaccess being read only in the past so I inserted step 3 from Digital Ocean’s WordPress setup into my Pi My Life Up process. The steps were supposed to be done before the WordPress setup. It became step “0” of my Pi My Life WordPress process, though I think you can run it any time before firing up the website for the first time.
I ran into an issue not covered in the guides – when I was done with the Pi My Life setup, I still had the Debian Apache welcome screen showing up, no WordPress in sight. I renamed index.html, as described in this stackoverflow post . He says delete, However renamed the file until I knew it was OK to delete it. I hate deleting things I don’t fully understand.
WordPress setup is fun, and longer than most because of the multiple guides. Now to learn about WordPress themes.