Fried Pancakes

I would first like to start off by thanking Mark at RootBSD for hooking me up with a sweet FreeBSD VPS! Their customer service is top-notch. Prices are unbeatable. And best of all… I get an clean untouched installation of FreeBSD.

Please note these instructions are only validated under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and PHP5.

Grabbing the right packages

Install lighttpd:

# cd /usr/ports/www/lighttpd/ && make install clean

Install mysql51-server

# cd /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server/ && make install clean

Install PHP5

# cd /usr/ports/lang/php5 && make install clean

Install PHP5-MySQL

# cd /usr/ports/databases/php5-mysql && make install clean

Configuring lighttpd

Make changes /usr/local/etc/lighttpd.conf with your favorite editor

Setup your lighttpd configuration as you like; I created a virtual host so I could have blog.friedpancakes.com:

$HTTP["host"] == "blog.friedpancakes.com" {

        server.document-root = "/var/www/data/blog.friedpancakes.com"
}

That’s not all. In order for lighttpd to handle PHP properly, fastcgi needs to be configured properly.

Continue editing lighttpd.conf:

Enable mod_fastcgi at the top by uncommenting the line at the top of the lighttpd configuration file.

Before you continue, make sure that you compiled PHP with CGI.

# php-cgi -v

You should get some feedback from that. Now if that’s setup properly, you can continue.

Find the section in the lighttpd configuration file where it says fastcgi.server. Since WordPress uses PHP, this step is required for lighttpd to handle PHP properly.

fastcgi.server             = ( ".php" =>
                              ( "localhost" =>
                                (
                                   "socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
                                   "bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/php-cgi"
                                 )
                               )
                            )

Ensure that the binary path above is where you have php-cgi.

Setting up MySQL
Open /etc/rc.conf with your preferred editor. Add the following line:

mysql_enable="YES"

This is required to start MySQL. Now start it up!

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server start

Proceed to create the database WordPress will use

# mysql -u root

mysql> create database wordpress;
mysql> grant all privileges on wordpress.* to "wordpress"@"localhost" identified by "your password";
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> exit;

WordPress

Now that you have your database setup. Let’s get WordPress on the system. Obviously, make the directories specific to how you configured lighttpd.

# cd /var/www
# fetch http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
# tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
# cp -r wordpress/* /var/www/data/blog.friedpancakes.com/
# mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

PHP

One last thing needs to be done to get PHP to work. When you install PHP from the FreeBSD ports tree, you really are getting PHP at its most pure form. While PCRE is included by default with PHP5, it’s not in FreeBSD. So you must install this part separately.

# cd /usr/ports/devel/php5-pcre/ && make install clean

And that’s it! You should now be able to begin blogging away.