A WordPress module for my FreedomBox

Until now everything I built was “just infrastructure”. The WordPress module is the first module that uses the infrastructure. Building a WordPress module as the first “real” module had two reasons. First: I need the module to house this blog . Second: the configuration and data inside the module is reasonably complex. This makes it ideal to develop and test the data-interface of my FreedomBox architecture.

Creating a WordPress module consists of the following steps:

• Create a LXC container to house the module.
• Install MySQL.
• Install PHP & Co.
• Install a Mail Transfer Agent (Exim4).
• Install and configure WordPress.
• Configure Apache.
• Configure the internet module.

Read this first.

This article is one in a series that describes the building of my FreedomBox. Information from the previous articles like network and software configuration is not repeated.

Create a LXC container to house the module.

cd /var/lib/lxc
mkdir wordpress
/usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian-box -n wordpress -p /var/lib/lxc/wordpress

Start the container and continue installation.

lxc-start -n wordpress -d

Login (password = root)

ssh root@wordpress.freedom.box

Inside the container issue the following commands:

passwd
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
dpkg-reconfigure locales
apt-get update
atp-get upgrade

Choose both a locale and default locale (my system: es_US.UTF-8).

Install MySQL.

apt-get install mysql-server

Install PHP & Co.

apt-get install php5 php5-mysql php-apc

Installation of PHP triggers the installation of Apache2. The php-apc package caches the byte codes of the PHP interpreter. This makes PHP execution much faster.

Install the Exim4 MTA.

WordPress needs a MTA to send notifications to the blog admin/user. I use a version of Exim4 that is probably way too powerful for this simple task.

apt-get install exim4-daemon-heavy

After installation you can use the following command to configure Exim4:

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

Most configurations should be “mail send by smarthost”.

Install and configure WordPress.

I found the Debian WordPress configuration a little bit confusing so I decided to install the official version:

apt-get install wget

cd /var/www

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xfvz latest.tar.gz

Create a WordPress database:

mysql -u root -p 

mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpress'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

Change the password in the line with the privileges statement (do not remove the quotes).
Create and edit a wp-config.php:

cd /var/www/wordpress
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Install your favorite text editor and edit wp-config.php. Change the MySQL settings and use the link in the “Authentication Unique Keys and Salts” section to get unique values.

The www-data user needs to be the owner of /var/www/wordpress.

cd /var/www/wordpress
chown -R www-data:www-data *

Remember: every time you edit one of the files in the wordpress directory you have to change the ownership to www-data afterwards.

Configure Apache2.

In my FreedomBox every request to Apache comes from the Nginx web-server in the internet module. Therefore Apache thinks that every request comes from the same IP address. This must be corrected otherwise things like logging and surveys won’t work as expected. To correct the IP address mod_rpaf must be installed and configured:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-rpaf
cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled

Edit rpaf.conf. Add the IP address of the internet module (192.168.1.10) to RPAFproxy_ips.
Make a symbolic link to mod_rewrite so you can have “pretty urls” in WordPress:

ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load

Create a file with the name wordpress inside the directory /etc/apache2/sites-available
The file should contain something like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerAdmin yourname@yourdomainname.com
	ServerName wordpress.yourdomainame.com 
	DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress

	<Directory />
		Options FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride None
	</Directory>

	<Directory /var/www/wordpress>
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
		AllowOverride All
		Order allow,deny
		allow from all
	</Directory>

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
	# alert, emerg.

	LogLevel warn
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Change both ServerAdmin and ServerName.
Enable the site by creating a symbolic link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled and by restarting the Apache web-server.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
ln -s ../sites-available/wordpress
apache2ctl restart

Configure the internet module to forward requests to the WordPress module.

Logout from the WordPress module and connect to the internet module:

ssh root@internet.freedom.box

Edit the Nginx configuration in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. Make it look like:

user  www-data; 
worker_processes  1; 

#error_log  logs/error.log; 
#error_log  logs/error.log  notice; 
#error_log  logs/error.log  info; 
#pid        logs/nginx.pid; 

events { 
    worker_connections  1024; 
} 

http { 
    include       mime.types; 
    default_type  application/octet-stream; 

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" ' 
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' 
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; 

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; 

    gzip              on; 
    sendfile          on; 
    keepalive_timeout 65; 
    server_names_hash_bucket_size 64; 

    server { 
      # this is a catch-all for requests with none of our hosts 

      listen 80 default; 
      location / { return 403; } 
    } 

    server { 
      server_name wordpress.yourdomainame.com; 

      location / { 
        proxy_set_header Host $host; 
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr; 

        proxy_pass http://wordpress.freedom.box; 
      } 
    } 
}

Change the server_name setting to the domain name you used inside the WordPress module.
Restart nginx

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Configure your router.

If you configure your router to forward port 80 to the internet module you can start blogging!