Wordpress on ChromeOS

Update: ChromeOS Beta Linux is in essence a Debian linux distribution, as is Ubuntu. I just followed the same instructions below and successfully installed wordpress onto my Ubuntu desktop machine. The only difference is that the IP Address 100.* is not necessary, just use localhost!

Ok, so most folks are happy enough to pay for windows or a Mac, I guess I am just tight, but I like free. If I could buy a decent linux laptop at a reasonable price, maybe I'd go that way, but they are so hard to find - So I use ChromeOS, and you know what? It just works... Most of the time... Anyways, I'm doing a bit of Wordpress development and thought I'd spend a morning to see if I can get Wordpress running locally on a ChromeOS device.

Of course, you cannot install stuff on "Chrome", so you'll need to start by enabling the linux beta on chrome.

Setting up the prerequisites

Thanks to these lads for getting me off to a flying start with the wordpress install. Basically open up a terminal window and:

• sudo apt update
• sudo apt install apache2 php
• sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

Verify Apache Working

• ip a
  • Default localhost/127.0.0.1 doesn't work on Chrome Linux as it doesn't point at the linux machine, but type ip a and in the midst of the blur of text, I can see there is an IP address in there "inet 100.115.92.198/28 brd 100.115.92.207 scope global eth0"
• So point the brower to http://100.115.92.198/ and whatdya know, I can see the default apache page returned, good stuff

Configure the database

• sudo apt install mariadb-server
• sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start
• sudo service mysqld status (seems to have started up correctly)
• sudo mysql_secure_installation
  • Enter Chrome root password - By default Chrome's root user password is blank
  • Set MariaDB root user password - just to avoid accidentally logging in as root user and messing things up
  • I left the anonymous user readonly access in place, is only dev and could be handy
  • Disallow remote root DB Access - Yes, why would you have anyone connecting to this over the network, is only for local development
  • Remove test database - Yes, sure WP will create all I need
  • Reload privilege table now - Yes - Why not!
• Remember if you reboot the machine, you need to restart the services (sudo systemctl start mariadb.service apache2.service)
• sudo mysql --version
  • Nice - This tells me that mariaDB/MySQL version 15.1 is installed and ready to go
• sudo mysql -u root (Connects to the MariaDB Shell, following commands entered at the MariaDB [(none)]> prompt!)
• create database wordpress ;
• use wordpress (Prompt changes to MariaDB [(wordpress)]>)
• GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO wordpress@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword'; (Creates a user called wordpress)
• flush privileges;
• quit

NOTE: I made a mess of the DB and needed to start over, so to remove the database I did the following, then started from the top again

• sudo apt list --installed | grep maria (to see what is installed for mariadb - loads!)
• sudo apt purge mariadb-server (delete the installation so I can start again)
• sudo rm -rf /var/lib/mysql (forcibly get rid of any of those files I might have messed up)
• sudo apt autoremove (to cleanup additional packages that where added to support mariadb)
• sudo apt list --installed | grep maria (just to make sure it is gone)

Install PHP MySQL Module

• sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql
• sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Installing Wordpress

So far so good, now all I need to do is install wordpress in the simplest possible fashion. Thanks to wordpress for these instructions. I'm not quite keen enough to take the latest nightly build, so I download the latest stable version (5.4.1) from here. When downloaded I click on "Show in Folder", and then move the file from Downloads folder to "Linux Files". I type ls -ltr and I can see the wordpress zip file there in my home directory, good oh!

• cd /var/www/html/
• sudo unzip ~/wordpress-5.4.1.zip

Great, so now I point my browser to "http://100.115.92.198/wordpress/" click "Let's Go", enter database name 'wordpress', username 'wordpress', password 'mypassword', database host 'localhost' and table prefix 'wp_' and I get an error, unable to create wp-config.php... I presume this is because the sensible default for the user running apache is not allowed to write files that will be published on your website... But this is a development system, on a chromebook, that will never be connected to the internet, so I do something you would never, never EVER do on a production server...

• sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/html (Please note if you are executing this on a production internet facing server, please now quit your job)

Alright Sparky! So again I point the browser to http://100.115.92.198/wordpress/ and fill in the connection details, now I can proceed with the installation, fill in a few more blanks and you are done!

Well one last thing, you probably want to open the file /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-config.php and in there add the code

/**

 * For developers: WordPress debugging mode.

 *

 * Change this to true to enable the display of notices during development.

 * It is strongly recommended that plugin and theme developers use WP_DEBUG

 * in their development environments.

 */

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

Ok, so have to admit, that has taken me most of the morning to get working, but hopefully with the notes above you can get yours to work a lot more quickly than I did.

Installing Themes & Plugins

The wordpress user interface allows installing themes and plugins, but to do so requires your server to have an FTP service running. To setup an FTP server you can:-

• sudo apt-get install vsftpd (basic installation of FTP)
• sudo apt-get install gedit (to install a text editor if you do not already have one)
• sudo cp /etc/vsftpd.conf /etc/vsftpd.conf_orig (Make a backup copy of the original configuration file)
• sudo gedit /etc/vsftpd.conf (or use your favorite text editor)
  • Add the line at local_enable=YES the end of the file and save
• sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart (to restart FTP)
• ps -ef | grep apache (to find out the name of the user running apache, the first column shows the user name, for me 'www-data'
• sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/html (probably not as bad as the chown 777 above, but definitely not something for the live server. We are now making the server the user is running as own all of the files and able to do anything with them, ideally that user should have readonly access to files in a production environment, but of course this is DEV only)

Hey presto - I can now install themes & plugins!

404 Errors

Whilst I got going fine, I started getting various 404 errors, API didn;t work, and some other funcky stuff. Well thanks to this post, I was able to figure out I needed to update my apache.conf file, (/etc/apache2/apache2.conf) to change the word "none" to "FileInfo", otherwise the .htaccess entries that wordpress needs are ignored by apache. I also learned in the process that in fact wordpress can dynamically change /var/www/html/.htaccess file, so the user running apache needs access to the file to allow updating the permalink settings.

Before Change

Directory /var/www/>

   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

   AllowOverride none

   Require all granted

</Directory>

After Change

Directory /var/www/>

   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

   AllowOverride FileInfo

   Require all granted

</Directory>