This tutorial will walk you through the steps of installing a WordPress website on Hetzner Cloud that runs on an Ubuntu LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, and PHP) server. Additionally, you will learn how to connect a domain name and install an auto-renewing SSL certificate.
Prerequisites:
- Domain name
- Hetzner Cloud account
Notes:
- Replace netwits.io with the name of your domain name in this tutorial
- A complete video tutorial is available at the end of this tutorial
1. Hetzner Cloud Setup
Assuming that you already have an account, you can access Hetzner Cloud at console.hetzner.cloud. Create a new project, and add a server with sufficient resources for your website.
After clicking on the Create & Buy Now button, your server will be ready to use within seconds. In addition to accessing your server via SSH directly, you can also access your server via the Cloud Console as indicated in the screenshot below.
2. Connect Your Domain Name
No matter where you bought your domain name from, you can connect it to your Hetzner Cloud server in one of two ways:
- Hetzner DNS Console: Add Hetzner nameservers to your domain registrar
- DNS A Records: Create DNS A records with your domain registrar that point to your Hetzner server’s IP address
For guidance with the latter, please see timestamp 5:40 in this Hetzner tutorial video.
3. Update System and Install LEMP Packages
Execute the following to update Ubuntu server.
apt update apt upgrade
Use the apt package manager to install PHP, MariaDB, and the Nginx web server.
apt install nginx mariadb-server php-fpm php-mysql
4. Install WordPress
After logging in to your server as described above, execute the following commands to install WordPress on Ubuntu.
cd /var/www
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
rm latest.tar.gz
chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress
find wordpress/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find wordpress/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;5. Setup the Database
Secure your MariaDB installation by adding a password and disabling other features. When prompted, answer Y.
mysql_secure_installation
Access the MariaDB console with the password that you just created.
mysql -u root -p
Within the MariaDB console, create a database for WordPress. Please choose your own database name, user name, and a password.
create database example_db default character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci; create user 'example_user'@'localhost' identified by 'example_pw'; grant all privileges on example_db.* TO 'example_user'@'localhost'; flush privileges; exit
6. Configure Nginx Web Server
Navigate to the directory which contains configuration files for the Nginx web server, and create a new configuration file with the text editor of your choice. In this example, the text editor is vim.
cd /etc/nginx/sites-available/ vim wordpress.conf
Use this configuration as a template for your website. Please change the server_name and make sure that the php-handler socket exists (you may have a different version of PHP installed).
upstream php-handler {
server unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name netwits.io www.netwits.io;
root /var/www/wordpress;
index index.php;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass php-handler;
}
}Make a symbolic link to tell Nginx about your website, and apply the changes by restarting the web server.
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/wordpress.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ nginx -t systemctl restart nginx
7. Finish WordPress Install
Assuming that DNS propagation has finished, you can now access your website via your domain name in a web browser. You will be prompted to finish the WordPress installation, part of which is entering the database name, user, and password that you created earlier.
Upon completion of the installation, you can access your WordPress administrator dashboard at http://netwits.io/wp-admin/
8. Install PHP Packages Required by WordPress
From your WordPress administrator dashboard, navigate to Tools > Site Health > Status and you may see a critical issue that says “One or more required modules are missing”.
To fix this, go back to your server’s console window and install these packages.
apt install php-curl php-dom php-mbstring php-imagick php-zip php-gd
9. Install an SSL Certificate for HTTPS
Secure your website with an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. To do this, execute the following commands.
apt install snapd snap install core; snap refresh core snap install --classic certbot ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot certbot --nginx
Finally back in your WordPress administrator dashboard, go to Settings > General and change the WordPress Address and Site Address to start with https.
Here is a complete video tutorial that will walk you through the steps to setup a WordPress website on Hetzner cloud.
