How to Setup WordPress on the Raspberry Pi

In this tutorial, you will learn how to setup the popular WordPress CMS on your Raspberry Pi.

For those who do not know, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that is used by over 60 million websites. It is very popular amongst bloggers but is also used by large websites such as TechCrunch.

I currently have WordPress running on my Raspberry Pi to act as a development server as it’s faster than using something like XAMPP.

Setting up WordPress on the Raspberry Pi is not hugely complicated. Once you have Apache, PHP and the MYSQL server set up, it is smooth sailing.

Before you go too far ahead in this tutorial, make sure that you have your MYSQL root password ready. We will be running through the steps to setting up a database for WordPress and showing you how to set up an SQL user to interact with the database all by using the MYSQL Command line.

If you’re interested, now is the time to set up WordPress on the Raspberry Pi.

Equipment List

Below are all the bits and pieces that I made use of for this Raspberry Pi WordPress tutorial.

Optional

Raspberry Pi Case ( Amazon )
USB Keyboard ( Amazon )
USB Mouse ( Amazon )
HDMI Cable ( Amazon )
Monitor ( Amazon )

Setting up WordPress on a Raspberry Pi

Before you start this tutorial make sure you have set up Apache and PHP. You will also need to have a MYSQL server running and accessible. As I mentioned earlier, you will need to have your MYSQL root password ready.

Downloading and Extracting WordPress

1. To start, we need to download and extract WordPress to our “/var/www/html” directory on our Raspberry Pi.

We will also need to take ownership of the “/var/www/html” folder with the “www-data” user and group. Doing this will allow PHP to process WordPress without running into any permission errors.

To achieve all of this, we will run a few commands, just type each line below into the terminal. You will need to update the “pi” user to the user you are using on your setup.

cd /var/www/html
sudo wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
sudo tar xzf latest.tar.gz
sudo mv wordpress/* ./
sudo rm -rf wordpress latest.tar.gz
sudo usermod -a -G www-data pi
sudo chown -R -f www-data:www-data /var/www/html

Creating the WordPress Database

2. Now that WordPress is downloaded and extracted to our Raspberry Pi, we will also need to set up a database within MYSQL for WordPress to store its information.

We need to first use the MySQL command to login. Use the “–p” flag for the password and “–u” for the username. Make sure your password is written right next to the “-p“ tag with no space.

Note: Replace password with the one you set up for the root user when you setup MySQL

sudo mysql -u root -p

3. Now that we have logged into the MYSQL server, we can issue a command to create a database for WordPress using this simple line:

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

4. Now we will create a separate user for this database, this is far safer from a security perspective.

While still in MYSQL issue the following command:

CREATE USER 'new_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'new_password';

Note: Make sure you replace new_user and new_password with details of your choosing, just remember what you choose as you will need to know both when we setup WordPress.

5. Once we have a new user, we will need to give it permissions to manage our new database.

We can do that with the command below, make sure you swap new_user, with whatever you entered in the previous step.

GRANT ALL ON wordpress.* TO 'new_user'@'localhost';

6. Now we have created our database and our user that we want to interact with it. We need to quit out of the MYSQL command interface.

We can do that by pressing CTRL + D.

WordPress First Setup Wizard

7. With that all done, we can now finally finish setting up WordPress, we can start this process by going to your Raspberry Pi’s IP address in a web browser.

You will be greeted with the following screen asking for you to select a language.

8. The next page will explain the details you need to have handy to install WordPress. You can just press “lets go” to get to the important screen.

9. You will now need to enter various details so that WordPress can connect to the MySQL database we setup.

Database Name – This is the database WordPress will connect to. Earlier in this tutorial we created a database called wordpress.
Username – This is the user we created in step 4, make sure you get this detail correct as it needs to connect to the above database.
Password – This is the password we set while creating the MYSQL user in step 4, again make sure you enter this correctly as it’s needed to connect to the database.
Database Host – Keep this to the default setting, we only need it to connect locally.
Table Prefix – Keep this to the default setting as well, there is no real need to change this

10. Assuming you entered all the correct details, you will now be able to press “Submit” to successfully install the software, follow the rest of the prompts to finalize the installation.

Conclusion

There is quite a bit more to learn about WordPress such as installing a WordPress theme or setting up plugins. Using a Raspberry Pi is a great way to learn all the basics without investing in an expensive web server.

You should now have WordPress setup on the Raspberry Pi and accessible. If you run into any issues, then be sure to let us know by leaving a comment.

Hi Alasdair,

If you would like to change the port that your website is accessible from then there is a couple of config files you need to modify.

First you need top open up the /etc/apache2/ports.conf file.

Within this file you should see something like below. All you need to do is add the port you want it to listen to below it.

For example if we wanted Apache to also learn on port 8080 we would do the following.
Find

Listen 80

Add Below

Listen 8080

With that done you will also need to modify the virtual host you created or the default one. If you are just using the default configuration you can modify the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

Within this file find and change the following line. We also have a example of changing the port to 8080.

Find:

<VirtualHost *:80>

Replace with:

<VirtualHost *:8080>

Once save, save file.

Then restart Apache by running the following command.

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Cheers,
Emmet

7 Comments

Max on March 2, 2023 at 2:47 am

Had the same problem, but got:
rm: cannot remove ‘/var/www/html/index.html’: Permission denied

1. Emmet on March 3, 2023 at 1:40 pm
  
  Editor
  
  Hi Max,
  
  Sorry to hear that you are having issues. Can you try placing “sudo” in front of that command.
  
  I have updated my original comment to include it.
  
  Cheers,
  Emmet
  
Michael Angelo on February 23, 2022 at 9:44 am

With gratitude I thank you for showing me the path through the barbed wired mine field. I couldn’t have so easily accomplished this task without your tutorial. Thank you for your generosity.

Alasdair Simpson on May 6, 2020 at 3:00 am

I’ve successfully followed your guides to setup Apache, PHPmyadmin, SQL, and WordPress. Can you either advise or do some guide on how to change the ports used, so that the webpage can be seen outside of my local network? For some reason my router doesn’t like using port 80 as an option.

I tried elsewhere, but got one part working, which then stopped another part from working, and would like to understand where I’m going wrong.

Many thanks for your guides, I find them clear to follow.

1. Emmet on May 6, 2020 at 2:51 pm
  
  Editor
  Hi Alasdair,
  
  If you would like to change the port that your website is accessible from then there is a couple of config files you need to modify.
  
  First you need top open up the /etc/apache2/ports.conf file.
  
  Within this file you should see something like below. All you need to do is add the port you want it to listen to below it.
  
  For example if we wanted Apache to also learn on port 8080 we would do the following.
  Find
  
  Listen 80
  
  Add Below
  
  Listen 8080
  
  With that done you will also need to modify the virtual host you created or the default one. If you are just using the default configuration you can modify the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf
  
  Within this file find and change the following line. We also have a example of changing the port to 8080.
  
  Find:
  
  <VirtualHost *:80>
  
  Replace with:
  
  <VirtualHost *:8080>
  
  Once save, save file.
  
  Then restart Apache by running the following command.
  
  sudo systemctl restart apache2
  
  Cheers,
  Emmet
  
Willard Williams on March 15, 2020 at 8:34 am

Hi there! once I finished the commands to add a new user and grant permissions to wordpress database, I followed the step to fire up wordpress by going to the server ip address, and I am only greeted with the Apache welcome screen. any ideas?

1. Emmet on March 18, 2020 at 5:12 pm
  
  Editor
  Hi Wllard,
  
  Theres a chance the default “index.html” file is being read before the “index.php” file provided by WordPress.
  
  Can you try running the following command to remove this file.
  
  sudo rm /var/www/html/index.html
  
  Cheers,
  Emmet