How to install Wordpress on Arch Linux

Every time I’ve tried to install Wordpress on Arch Linux it was a tragedy. Sometimes a configuration was missing, sometimes stuff not well known was broken and I never found an updated and complete guide. So here you are!

In all the following commands I’ve omitted “sudo”. Please use it when it is necessary.

Before starting make you sure that all the packages are updated.

pacman -Syu

Install Apache

First of all, you need to install and configure Apache, the web server.

pacman -S apache

After the installation you have to start Apache and if you want you can set the auto-start at boot time with the enable command.

systemctl start httpd

systemctl enable httpd

At this point you have to change some configurations of Apache. In order to do that, you can use your preferred editor like nano or vim. I’ll use nano. (If you aren’t a nano user here’s some tip: to search a string you have to press ctrl+w; to exit you have to press ctrl+x and type ‘y’ or ‘n’ in order to save or not the file. Remember that the saving process can give an error if the file isn’t opened as root and only the root user can edit it).

So open the httpd.conf file

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

and uncomment (remove the #) the following string.

#LoadModule unique_id_module modules/

At this point you have to restart Apache to apply the changes.

systemctl restart httpd

To make sure that all is correctly set and Apache is working you have to simply write an html file and put it into the /srv/http folder. So you can use again nano

nano /srv/http/index.html

to write this simple html file.

    <title>Hello World</title>
        <h1>This is a test. Apache Web Server is working</h1>

Now open your broswer and go to http://localhost. If everything is up and running you should see a page like this:

Install PHP

Now it is the time to install PHP with the following command.

pacman -S php php-cgi php-gd php-pgsql php-apache

As you can image, you need to configure some stuff. Open again with your preferred editor the httpd.conf file:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

comment (add a ‘#’) this line

LoadModule mpm_event_module modules/

and uncomment (remove the ‘#’) this one.

#LoadModule mpm_prefork_module modules/

Finally you have to add these lines at the bottom of the file.

LoadModule php7_module modules/
AddHandler php7-script php
Include conf/extra/php7_module.conf

Now it’s the time to configure the php.ini. Open the file

nano /etc/php/php.ini

and uncomment (remove the ‘;’) the following lines.


Now PHP (should be) is correctly set. To check if all is working, you can write a simple info page inside srv/http/. Open the editor,

nano /srv/http/info.php

write the following line

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

and restart the httpd service.

systemctl restart httpd

Now, if you open your broswer and you go to http://localhost/info.php, you should see a page like this:

Install Maria DB

Now you have to install and create the database. You are going to install Maria DB, the implementation of MySQL for Arch Linux.

pacman -S mariadb libmariadbclient mariadb-clients

After the installation you have to set some base configuration with this command.


As you guess, you need to start and enable the service.

systemctl start mysqld
systemctl enable mysqld

Before creating the database, you have to set the root password and some other configurations. You can do it with this command


Finally now you can create your own database. Connect to the MySQL console with this command.

mysql -u root -p

After you type the password, you can start to create the database. Of course you can change the name of the database and the user.

CREATE USER 'wpuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser'@'localhost';

FINALLY it’s time to install Wordpress inside the /srv/http folder.

cd /srv/http
tar xvzf latest.tar.gz
cd wordpress

Now you have to change the ownership of the folder wordpress to the http group.

chown -R root:http /srv/http/wordpress

The last step is to create the Wordpress config file starting from the default one.

cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

All you have to do is opening the file

nano wp-config.php

and set the name of the database, the user and the password.

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wpuser');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');

Now everything is done. To check if it is true, open the broswer and go to http://localhost/wordpress and you should see a page like this.

Now you can go through the classic setup of Wordpress. Enjoy it!

Published also on Medium

777 Words

2018-01-19 02:00 +0200

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