Setting up Digital Ocean to run WordPress

I’ve recently started launching WordPress sites - starting with Talitha, and now this site. In my haste to move a few sites that seemed like they’d work better as WordPress sites, I appear to have over-loaded my single Digital Ocean droplet, so it’s time to spin up a new one.

As ever with Digital Ocean, they have an incredibly good tutorial on setting up WordPress on Ubuntu¹, but since I like automating things, I thought it was worth recording the steps I took (partly for my reference). First off, I ran a slightly modified version of my Digital Ocean set up script². This script does a few things (mostly based on Bryan Kennedy’s excellent post on getting a new server configured):

1. Installs all the things (emacs, git, fail2ban etc);
2. Sets up a non-root user, and prevents logging in as root, or logging in with passwords;
3. Set up automated security updates.
4. Run through the steps in another tutorial for securely applying WordPress updates.

Once I’d done that, getting WordPress installed just took a few steps:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql
sudo mysql_install_db
sudo /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation
sudo apt-get install php5-fpm

From there, I needed to:

1. SCP the old WordPress site over to my new droplet (both the files and the MySQL database);
2. Repoint my DNS records to point to the new droplet;
3. Set up my new SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt (I’ve been meaning to write about my Let’s Encrypt set-up for a while - it’s simple, but works well for the low traffic sites I look after).

If you’re reading this, the process worked!