Wordpress How-To

Since I'm always not in the habit of jotting the stuffs I do at work, well I'm going to change that for this particular test install.

My bosses seems to be keen in selling SaaS, surprisingly, and they want to know if it's doable. I know for a fact it is doable, but thought I'd do it for well, for work sake.

I'm going to install CentOS 6.4. As a matter of fact, I had installed RHEL 6.3 earlier, but since I don't have a "valid" subscription, I'd skip RHEL and decided to work on CentOS instead.

So, first things first, always update your copy of CentOS or Linux or whichever distribution you pick to install.

The mirror list that is hard coded into the CentOS yum repo list /etc/yum.repos.d does not seem to be working as it should, I wonder why. And I don't know why they haven't gotten this fixed.

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
And remark all mirrorlist configuration parameter and add baseurl=http://mirror.nus.edu.sg/centos/6/centosplus/$basearch/

Replace the text /centosplus/ appropriately. e.g. For updates simply replace it with /updates/.

Yes, I'm going to use a mirror which in Singapore to do my yum updates. And I don't understand why none of the Malaysian mirrors are so unreliable.

First things first, assign an IP address to the first assignable network interface eth0. If you choose to use bonding, I'm not going to cover that for this test install.

Disable IPv6 since nobody out there is using it appropriately still by adding the following into /etc/modprobe.d/dist.conf

# Disable IPv6
alias ipv6 off

And add the following into /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING_IPV6=no

Disable IPv6 ip6tables

# chkconfig ip6tables off

Next would be install all the appropriate patches. Run yum check-update for absolutely no reason except to list all the packages that will be replace when you actually run yum update.

Go gungho and run yum -y update and REBOOT !

Apparently I picked basic install, and as it turns out I don't have wget installed, run yum install -y wget. Once that's done download the EPEL yum repository rpm. You're going to be installing, well I'm going to be installed some packages from Fedora Project's EPEL repository.

# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Install the EPEL yum repository rpm package file
# rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Apparently wordpress is available for install from Fedora's EPEL yum repository, surprisingly enough.

Install php (version 5.3.3) by running yum install php. The dependencies that are required for the php installing are
apr
apr-util
apr-util-ldap
httpd (version 2.2.15)
httpd-tools
libedit
mailcap
php-cli
php-common

Next, install mysql-server (version 5.1.69), by running yum install -y mysql-server. And the dependencies are, in no particular order:
mysql
perl
perl-DBD-MySQL
per-DBI
perl-Module-Pluggable
perl-Pod-Escapes
perl-Pod-Simple
perl-libs
perl-version

Enable httpd to after the next reboot. And don't forget to start it up either

# chkconfig httpd on
# service httpd start

Since iptables is turned on by default allow port 80 on iptables by adding the following into the /etc/sysconfig/ipfilter

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Restart iptables

# service iptables restart

There's a possible chance that the HTTPS might be used, so you can always add the HTTPS port of 443 later if you need to.

Since this is going to be a lengthy post. I am going to end this right here. I'll be continuing the later part of the install under a different entry.