How to Install WordPress on CentOS 8

WordPress is a very popular PHP based CMS (Content Management System). For small businesses, personal/hobby websites, WordPress can be a lifesaver. In this article, I am going to show you how to install WordPress on CentOS 8. So, let’s get started.

Installing PHP, Apache and MariaDB:

As I’ve said earlier, WordPress is written on PHP programming language. So, you must have a working LAMP server installed on CentOS 8 in order to run WordPress.

First, update the DNF package repository with the following command:

$ sudo dnf makecache

Now, install Apache, PHP, MariaDB with the following command:

$ sudo dnf install mariadb mariadb-server httpd

httpd-tools php php-cli php-json php-gd php-mbstring php-pdo php-xml

php–mysqlnd php–pecl–zip wget

To confirm the installation, press Y and then press <Enter>.

Apache, PHP and MariaDB should be installed.

Apache httpd service won’t be running (inactive) by default on CentOS 8.

$ sudo systemctl status httpd

Now, start the Apache httpd service with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl start httpd

Now, Apache httpd service should be running (active).

$ sudo systemctl status httpd

Now, add Apache httpd service to the system startup with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl enable httpd

mariadb service won’t be running (inactive) by default on CentOS 8.

$ sudo systemctl status mariadb

Now, start the mariadb service with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl start mariadb

Now, mariadb service should be running (active).

$ sudo systemctl status mariadb

Now, add mariadb service to the system startup with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Creating a Database for WordPress:

Now, you have to create a new MariaDB database for WordPress.

First, login to the MariaDB shell with the following command:

$ sudo mysql –u root –p

Now, type in your password and press <Enter>. By default, no password is set. So just press <Enter> if you’re following along.

You should be logged into the MariaDB console.

Now, create a new MariaDB database wordpress with the following SQL statement:

MariaDB> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

Now, create a new user wordpress with the password secret and grant the user wordpress all privileges (read, write, modify etc.) to the database wordpress with the following SQL statement:

MariaDB> GRANT ALL ON wordpress.* TO ‘wordpress’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘secret’;

Now, for the changes to take effect, run the following SQL statement:

MariaDB> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now, exit out of the MariaDB database console as follows:

MariaDB> quit

Downloading and Installing WordPress:

WordPress is not available in the official package repository of CentOS 8. So, you must download it from the official website of WordPress and install it on CentOS 8. It’s very easy.

First, navigate to the /var/www directory as follows:

$ cd /var/www

Now, download the latest WordPress archive from the official website of WordPress with the following command:

$ sudo wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

wget is downloading WordPress archive. It may take a few minutes to complete.

WordPress archive should be downloaded.

The WordPress archive file latest.tar.gz should be in the /var/www directory as you can see in the screenshot below.

$ ls -lh

Now, extract the WordPress archive file latest.tar.gz with the following command:

$ sudo tar xvzf latest.tar.gz

Once the WordPress archive file latest.tar.gz is extracted, a new directory wordpress/ should be created as you can see in the screenshot below.

$ ls -lh

Now, you can remove the latest.tar.gz file as follows:

$ sudo rm -v latest.tar.gz

Now, change the owner and group of the wordpress/ directory and its contents to apache as follows:

$ sudo chown -Rf apache:apache ./wordpress/

Now, change the permission or the wordpress/ directory and its content to 775 as follows:

$ sudo chmod -Rf 775 ./wordpress/

If you have SELinux enabled (which is very likely on CentOS 8/RHEL 8), run the following command to set the correct SELinux context to the /var/www/wordpress directory and its contents.

$ sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t
"/var/www/wordpress(/.*)?"

For the SELinux changes to take effect, run the following command:

$ sudo restorecon -Rv /var/www/wordpress

Now, create a new Apache configuration file wordpress.conf for WordPress with the following command:

$ sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/wordpress.conf

Vi text editor should open. Now, press i to go to INSERT mode.

Now, type in the following lines of codes in the wordpress.conf file.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin root@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
<Directory "/var/www/wordpress">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/wordpress_error.log
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/wordpress_access.log common
</VirtualHost>

Finally, the wordpress.conf file should look as shown in the screenshot below.

Now, press <Esc>, type in :wq! and press <Enter> to save the file.

Now, restart the Apache httpd service with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl restart httpd

Apache http service should be active without any errors as you can see in the screenshot below.

$ sudo systemctl status httpd

Accessing WordPress:

In order to access WordPress installed on your CentOS 8 machine, you must know the IP address or domain name of your CentOS 8 machine.

You can find the IP address of your CentOS 8 machine with the following command:

$ ip a

As you can see, the IP address of my CentOS 8 machine is 192.168.20.129. It will be different for you. So, make sure to replace it with yours from now on.

Now, open your favorite web browser and visit http://192.168.20.129. You should see the following page. Click on Let’s go.

Now, type in the MariaDB database information (i.e. Database Name, Username, Password). Leave the Database Host and Table Prefix as it is if you don’t know what they are. Once you’re done, click on Submit