To setup a WordPress website on Digital Ocean there are multiple ways to to do it. You can do an amazing Trellis setup, you can use a one-click WordPress image or you can set up things manually following their tutorials. Here is a short list of how do do it manually setup by step following their tutorials to get a site up and running on a LEMP using a Ubuntu 18.0.4 Droplet
Digital Ocean Account Setup
To work with Digital Ocean you need an account. It can be one run by developer, but preferably one client runs and to which he invites you as a developer and or DevOps. So you need the following for starters
- Setup of account by client with DO
- Team Setup with access for developer
Droplet Setup
Droplet’s setup is relatively easy using the Digital Ocean’s interface. You need to choose the proper droplet, your preferred region, Droplet size and Droplet base OS.
- Droplet Size – At least 1 GB
- Region Choice
- Ubuntu 18.0.4 Setup with SSH keys attached
- FQDN domain name connected to ip Droplet
- Domain name must be directed to Digital Ocean DNS Server from Domain Service Provider
- Domain at Digital Ocean must be directed with A Record to Droplet’s IP
- Digital Ocean LEMP with WordPress
WordPress Setup Digital Ocean
Once you have taken care of the Droplet and Domain setup we move onto the actual guide for setting up a WordPress LEMP. This guide will be your base. It explains all and refers to requirements needed like:
- initial Ubuntu 18.0.4 Server Setup
- LEMP Setup
- Let’s Encrypt SSL Setup
before moving onto setting things up like the
- actual database installation,
- PHP extensions,
- WordPress Download
- WordPress Config Tweaks
- WordPress GUI Installation
Digital Ocean Initial Server Setup
Digital Ocean has a great guide mentioning where need be all extra steps to take to setup a basic Ubuntu Server to get going
It will guide you through setting up a server with
- Sudo User,
- basic firewall,
- external access
Digital Ocean LEMP Setup
For the LEMP setup there is another great guide. It will go through all the necessary steps to set up a LEMP with:
- Nginx webserver,
- MySQL Database server,
- PHP-FPM PHP Parser
on your Ubuntu Linux Droplet.
SSL Setup
Let’s Encrypt SSL Setup to get a free SSL certificate is not hard anymore these days and DO also gots your back here with this guide. It explains the DNS needs to set you up with LE SSL using Certbot.
Database Setup
MySQL Database installation on MYSQL Server is explained in the base tutorial. It basically tells you how to add the database from the command line with needed privileges and such.
PHP Extensions
Installing the necessary PHP Extensions is also explained in the base guide just like the database setup. Just follow it, install the necessary extensions with apt:
- sudo apt update
- sudo apt install php-curl php-gd php-intl php-mbstring php-soap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-zip
See guide for all the details
WordPress Installation
Downloading of the needed WordPress files to run the WordPress CMS is what you need to do here. Also explained in base guide as well as on WordPress. We can use curl for this step as you will see in the guide.
WordPress Configuration
Configuring the WordPress configuration file to work with the set up database, necessary constants for security like the AUTH_KEY.
Installation via Interface
Installation of WordPress following the instructions in the browser. Explained in base guide as well as on WordPress and actually pretty self explanatory.
