Setting Up Personal Websites¶

Author:	Brant C. Faircloth
Copyright:	This documentation is available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

Modification History¶

See Setting Up Personal Websites.

Purpose¶

I’ve setup personal wordpress installations for everyone in the lab (that wants one) - primarily so that folks don’t have to use weebly.

Steps¶

Create appropriate entry in DNS
Log into webserver VPS
Log into MySQL as admin user

Create new database(s) for personal website(s), create a new user for that db, then assign privileges to DB user

CREATE DATABASE <name>_faircloth_lab;
CREATE USER <name>_flab IDENTIFIED BY "STRONG PASSWORD";
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON <name>_faircloth_lab.* to <name>_flab@localhost IDENTIFIED BY "STRONG PASSWORD";

Copy over Nginx config for new user’s website

cd /etc/nginx/conf.d/
cp template.website.bak <name>.faircloth-lab.org

Edit file to reflect reasonable values (change <name>)

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  <name>.faircloth-lab.org;
    access_log /var/www/html/<name>.faircloth-lab.org/logs/access.log;
    error_log /var/www/html/<name>.faircloth-lab.org/logs/error.log;

    # note that these lines are originally from the "location /" block
    root   /var/www/html/<name>.faircloth-lab.org/public_html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }
    error_page 404 /404.html;
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Make appropriate directories in /var/www/html/

cd /var/www/html
mkdir -p <name>.faircloth-lab.org/{logs,public_html}

Download and unzip wordpress to public_html
Change permissions of files within public_html
Restart Nginx
Setup certbot for website and choose to redirect traffic from http to https:
certbot --nginx
Visit new site and setup
https://<name>.faircloth-lab.org/
At new site, turn of ability to comment, remove sample comment, and turn off discussion for initial post
Copy over theme files

Adjust permissions

chown nginx:nginx <name>.faircloth-lab.org/{logs,public_html}
cd public_html
chown -R <admin>:<admin> -R *
chown -R nginx:nginx wp-content
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;