Written by Admin on 2025-05-06

WordPress Download for Linux: A Simple Guide

If you are a Linux user, you might wonder how to get WordPress running on your system. Fortunately, it's not a daunting task if you follow the right steps. In this article, we will go through the WordPress download for Linux, including prerequisites, installation, and some common issues you might face.

Prerequisites

Before you download WordPress, make sure you have the following packages installed on your Linux distribution:

• Apache web server
• MySQL or MariaDB database server
• PHP version 7.3 or later, including several required modules.

You can install them on Debian-based systems (Ubuntu, Mint) using the following command:

sudo apt update sudo apt install apache2 mysql-server php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql php-curl php-gd php-xml php-mbstring

If you have a different distribution, check your software repository or search for installation instructions.

Downloading and Installing WordPress

Once you have installed the necessary packages, it's time to download WordPress. You can get the latest version from the official website or fetch it using the following command:

wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Extract the archive to Apache's document root directory (/var/www/html by default):

sudo tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz -C /var/www/html/

Rename the extracted directory to something meaningful, like your website name:

sudo mv /var/www/html/wordpress /var/www/html/your-website-name

Create a MySQL database and user for your WordPress installation. You can do it using the following command:

sudo mysql -u root -p

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE wordpressdb; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpressdb.* TO 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> EXIT;

Now, you need to configure WordPress to use your database. Copy the sample configuration file and edit it with your database information:

cp /var/www/html/your-website-name/wp-config-sample.php /var/www/html/your-website-name/wp-config.php sudo nano /var/www/html/your-website-name/wp-config.php

Find the following lines and change them to match your database name, user, and password:

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpressdb'); define('DB_USER', 'wordpressuser'); define('DB_PASSWORD', 'your_password'); define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Save the file and exit the editor.

Finally, set the correct permissions on the WordPress files and directories:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/your-website-name sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/your-website-name sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/your-website-name/wp-content/uploads

Testing and Troubleshooting

After completing the installation, you can navigate to your website in the web browser and start setting up WordPress. You might encounter some issues, though, such as "internal error 500" or "missing PHP modules." Here are some tips to troubleshoot them:

• Check your Apache and MySQL logs for errors (/var/log/apache2/error.log and /var/log/mysql/error.log by default).
• Ensure that the required PHP modules are installed (type php -m to list them).
• Disable Apache's "mod_security" module if it's causing issues.
• Increase PHP's memory limit or execution time if needed.
• Make sure that the database connection details in wp-config.php are correct.

Conclusion

In summary, downloading and installing WordPress on Linux is not complicated, but it requires some initial setup and configuration. Once you have everything set up correctly, you can enjoy the power and flexibility of the world's most popular CMS on your Linux system.