Tips for when Setting up WordPress

Platform: Ubuntu 9.04/Apache 2

To set up WordPress as a virtual directory under a VirtualHost, add an alias to the host file in /etc/apache2/sites-available:

e.g.:

<VirtualHost 172.16.134.5:80>

  Alias /blog/ "/usr/share/wordpress/"

  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 DocumentRoot /home/wordpress/public_html
 DirectoryIndex index.php

  <Directory "/usr/share/wordpress/">

  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

  AllowOverride All

  Order allow,deny

  Allow from all

  </Directory>

  ...

</VirtualHost>

The guide I used was https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WordPress.

Note: where you run the command "sudo bash /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n wordpress localhost" you MUST change localhost to the IP or DNS name if you are setting up the site on a remote server. The reason, as I found out the hard way (I use "localhost" at first) is that the script creates a file under /etc/wordpress called config-<hostname>.php. Then when you go to run the web installation routine, the application can't find the config file, unless you set <hostname> in the above command to match exactly the domain used in the URL. This is because the config file is constructed in /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php using $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].