Digital Ocean is perhaps the most economical cloud platforms out there… and is perfectly within reach for running multiple site or high-traffic WordPress installs. However if you are just starting out, there’s going to be a slight learning-curve (naturally). Here’s a tutorial to give you a step-by-step walkthrough from spinning up a fresh droplet to publishing a WordPress website.
Of all the choices of Linux distros, Debian is our flavour of choice — it’s a source distro and doesn’t have any meddling into the OS incurred by means of repackaging.
The video tutorial covers the following steps:
- Booting up a new droplet.
- Creating a sudo user for administrative purposes.
- Configuring the sudo user-account to not be prompted for passwords.
- Installing zsh shell and oh-my-zsh framework plus 2 handy plugins.
- Installing the LAMP server.
- Installing PHPMyAdmin from the repository.
- Securing Apache’s public web-directories.
- Installing WordPress via command-line.
- Installing certbot to enable HTTPS / SSL on the WordPress install.
- Installing WP-CLI to manage WordPress installation(s) and common WordPress operations from command-line.
- Deploying WordPress website to production URL via WP-CLI.