How to Manually Install WordPress

I will start the series of WordPress tutorials with the basics: How to install WordPress.

This article will help you get started with WordPress and create your website/blog using the best Content Management Software out there.

You will learn what are the steps of setting up WordPress and how you can create a database in cPanel, phpMyAdmin or directly on Linux how you can add WordPress files via FTP or on Linux.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is the most used CMS platform and powers tens of millions of websites on the Internet (if not hundreds of millions).

Then, you will find a large amount of resources for WordPress, like free and Premium WordPress themes and plugins.

Plus the developers community for WordPress is continuously growing, so you will immediately find a plugin you need or help from professionals who work with WordPress every day. Like we do!

Create a Database for you WordPress site

WordPress uses a database to store information, your posts, pages and comments.

That is why creating the database is the first step that you need to take to manually install WordPress.

1. Create the database using cPanel

If you are on shared hosting like everyone who is getting started online, chances are that you will have a cPanel account to manage your website.

With cPanel things are quite straight forward and if you follow the steps outlined below.

2. Create the database using phpMyAdmin

3. Create the database on Linux

If you are on a VPS or dedicated server on Linux that’s great, as we are Linux fans.

Even if Linux requires some basic knowledge to make sure that you do not make any mistakes, creating a database involves only a few commands.

First you will need to login to mysql using the command below:

mysql -u root -p

This will log you in as a root with the password you have. But if you would like to use a different user just replace root with that user.

Once you are logged into mysql you will need to create the database and a user for that database.

To provide you an example I will use blog as username and blogdb as database name.

CREATE USER blog@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'strong_password_for_wordpress';

CREATE DATABASE blogdb;

GRANT ALL ON blogdb.* TO blog@localhost;

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

EXIT;

Type the above commands one by one and make sure that you also include the semicolon – “;”.

Remember to replace “strong_password_for_wordpress” with a strong password, preferably something generated.

Install the WordPress files

The next step after you create the database is to download WordPress

1. Install WordPress via FTP

2. Install WordPress on Linux

To create the database on Linux was not really complicated, so I will continue to keep things simple for you.

To install WordPress on Linux you will need to navigate to the directory where you want to place the files. To do this you can use the cd command:

cd /srv/www/blog/public_html/

/srv/www/blog/public_html/ is just an example where you can have your site

Then you will have to use the commands below (one at a time) to download, decompress WordPress and remove any unnecessarily files.

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz
cp -rvf wordpress/* .
rm -rf wordpress
rm latest.tar.gz

Setup wp-config.php

The final step of your WordPress installation is to

Final Words

I hope that this tutorial will help you successfully install WordPress and get started blogging or selling your products and services really quickly.

But if you encounter any issues or have questions/suggestions, please use the comments form below to send them.