Create your WordPress Blog in less than 20 minutes

There are many free blog platforms available on the internet. Often, these platforms have many rules for their users. To become independent, you have to setup your own blog. In this tutorial, I will guide you through the process of setting up your own WordPress blog in 20 minutes.

Server

The first step is to get your own (Linux) server. In this tutorial, we will make use of a Linux (Ubuntu) server. There are many places where you can get your own Linux server. For example, you can get your own Ubuntu server at Amazon AWS.

Domain name

This is optional, but recommended! It is easier to remember www.myblog.org than 54.123.53.28 (note: these are just a random domain name and a random IP address). There are many places on the internet where you can get a domain name. Whenever you’ve obtained a domain name, make sure that you point it to the IP address of your server. If you don’t know how to do this, ask your provider where you obtained your domain name, or feel free to ask me.

LAMP stack

In order to run WordPress, we need the software where WordPress depends on. We already have the L (Linux, our server). Now we only need the A, M and P. The A stands for Apache and is the backbone of the blog. All network traffic is handled by the webserver called Apache. The M is the M of MySQL. Here, all data is stored. All the blog posts and comments are stored in the database management system MySQL. The P stands for PHP and this interpreter runs all the WordPress code. Now in your Linux terminal, execute the following command to install the LAMP stack:

sudo apt-get install lamp-server

During the installation, you will be asked some questions. For example, the root password for your MySQL root user. This is of course your own choice. After approximately 2 minutes, this will be finished. Now we have 28 minutes left for installing WordPress!

Database

But first you need to setup a database. This is done by first logging in to the MySQL server:

mysql -uroot -p

Now your password will be asked. Fill in the password you created during the installation. After that, you can create a database, for example a database named “wordpress”:

CREATE DATABASE `wordpress`;

And then close the MySQL terminal by typing the following:

exit

WordPress

And in fact, we are almost there. The last thing we need to do, is to install WordPress. For this, we will first navigate to our document root:

cd /var/www/html/

And then we download a compressed version of the latest WordPress:

sudo wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

And we unpack it using this line of code:

sudo tar xzvf latest.tar.gz

You are almost done! Your WordPress installation is visible on the following URL:

http://[server-ip-address]/wordpress/

You can go through the screens yourself. Use the database user “root”, the password you’ve created during the installation and the database name you created in the database step. So now we have setup WordPress in less than 20 minutes! If you have any questions left, feel free to ask me.

Remarks

When security is important for you, make sure to not use “root” as a MySQL user, but create another MySQL user yourself (and invoke access for the “root” user).