Hacking Away a Sunday Night

Country music playing.  Keyboard typing. Still seeing a little light out over the fjord outside my parents' house here in Tysvær. Just finished setting up a server in Bergen to host WordPress sites. It’s a task that might seem easy for seasoned system administrators. However, for me (not being a seasoned sysadmin) it was a nice chance to learn something new by setting all this up via command line remotely, talking to a machine several hours away (if traveling by bus). Feels satisfying somehow. Command line definitely adds to the coolness factor.

Memo to myself of resources used

1. I first installed LAMP on my linux server, which is a bundle open-source software used for hosting web sites.
2. Since I had a web app already running on the default port 80, I wanted to change the apache default port, solution for that here.
3. Restarting the server surfaced some errors complaining about a missing servername, found a solution here.
4. After searching some more I found this nice writeup of how to install WordPress on linux via command line.
5. I followed the steps in the how-to for a while until I realized that I had forgotten my mysql password. Found a way to reset mysql password here.
6. The wordpress “pretty” permalinks didn’t work properly. Solution here.

Presto! Server successfully hosting a wordpress installation. :)