Setup WordPress with UpCloud or Linode on LAMP stack

Before diving into the article let me give you the output which you’ll be able to see after performing the coming operations in the article. If you wordpress site currently displays URLs like https://abc.com/?post=123 or https://abc.com/index.php/page/test-post then this is the right article for you to follow. By following this you’ll be able to get rid of those ugly URLs and make them something like https://proappdev.com/php/hello-world/.

I highly recommend to follow this tutorial to install basic WordPress setup. But remember its a basic setup not the production ready with friendly URLs so there are more steps involved to achieve that which I would like to highlight below.

Configurations

Make sure that mod_rewrite is enabled on your server setup, to check this do following.

– Create phpinfo.php file in /var/www/html/yoursite.com/public_html/

– Place this code inside <?php phpinfo();?>

– Now save the file and visit https://yoursite.com/phpinfo.php, now find mod_rewrite in that if you see it then move ahead otherwise continue with this

– sudo a2enmod rewrite

– sudo systemctl restart apache2

Now at this stage we can now move ahead.

Edit the configuration file

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/yoursite.com.conf

Now modify the configurations as below

<VirtualHost *:80>
    <Directory /var/www/html/yoursite.com/public_html>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
        ServerName yoursite.com
        ServerAlias www.yoursite.com
        ServerAdmin [email protected]
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/yoursite.com/public_html

        ErrorLog /var/www/html/yoursite.com/logs/error.log
        CustomLog /var/www/html/yoursite.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

At this stage we are done with configurations, time to move to wordpress admin to make our URLs friendly.

WordPress settings

Go to WordPress Admin >> Settings >> Permalinks now you’ll be able to see the following screen

Now you can choose any friendly slug that you like and then click on save changes. Now you should be able to see your URLs in friendly form without index.php.