Subject: WordPress on Debian

From: Kent West <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 11:11:06 -0500

There's a lot of conflicting documentation out there for installing 
WordPress on Debian, so I thought I'd come to you folks, who generally 
have a lot of wisdom and knowledge in all things Debian.

This will wind up being more a theoretical discussion than a specific 
question of how-to, I'm afraid....

Understand I'm pretty much a novice when it comes to Apache2 and 
WordPress and MySQL, etc (and to web stuff in general).

It seems that some docs indicate that the WordPress (WP) should put part 
of its installation in /srv, and part in /usr/lib, and part in /var/lib, 
and part in /var/www, etc.

On a philosophical/theoretical level, I want all my web-facing stuff on 
a single partition, preferably /home (as in /home/web), so that visitors 
to the site have no ability to tinker on the other partitions. Why would 
the HFS recommend that user-accessible files be on system partitions 
instead of on "safer" partitions?

Am I thinking wrongly?

I don't really even know enough to ask the right questions, but I'm 
hoping this might stir some conversations that lead me to asking the 
right questions. When I try to put my WP stuff on /home/web, I get 
confused about what goes where (because of the conflicting 
documentation, and not knowing what the various parts of 
Apaceh2/WP/mysql do),, and I get varying levels of success (but mostly 
failure) depending on what I try.

Thanks for any insight!

-- 
Kent West     <*)))><
http://kentwest.blogspot.com
Praise Yah! \o/

---

From: Ric Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 16:32:15 -0400

On 09/19/2016 12:11 PM, Kent West wrote:
> right question few years vns.

A few years back, I just installed Proxmox to bare metal on a dedicated 
and used turnkeylinux containers. It's a one click install via html 
interface from your desktop browser..
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Downloads#Proxmox_Virtual_Environment_4.2_.28ISO_Image.29
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/all
Today, Docker gets all the press for doing what Proxmox did years ago. 
Plus, the Proxmox server is built on Debian. Yay! Ric
-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

---

From: Tony Baldwin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:20:07 -0400

I have always downloaded the latest from wordpress, created a DB  on my 
server and basically manually installed the upstream pkg (which I know 
is often discouraged here, but if you do it Our Way (ie. the Debian Way,
aka the Right Way for most stuff), and then ask any questions on 
#wordpress on freenode, they get all nasty (I've been banned from the 
channel for life!)
I make a new user on the server for each new WP site, and then install 
their WP in /home/$user/www . much simpler than having bits of it all 
over the machine.
I do the same with dokuwiki installations and other CMS or site 
platforms, too, installing from upstream.

tony
http://tonybaldwin.me
all tony, all the time

-- 
http://tonybaldwin.me
all tony, all the time

---

From: Miles Fidelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:26:14 -0400

On 9/19/16 12:20 PM, Tony Baldwin wrote:

> I have always downloaded the latest from wordpress, created a DB  on 
> my server and basically manually installed the upstream pkg (which I 
> know is often discouraged here, but if you do it Our Way (ie. the 
> Debian Way,

That's what I do as well.  For complex software (e.g., WordPress, 
Drupal, mailing list managers), I always end up downloading the latest 
tarball, unpacking it, and then ./config; make; make test; make 
install.  It all just works so much better than relying on out-of-date 
packages.

If I want to get ambitious, and keep track of things via the package 
manager, I use checkinstall.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

---

From: Tony Baldwin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 12:53:35 -0400

> manager, I use checkinstall.

I like stuff in git repos (like hubzilla, gnu/social, etc) or with its 
own built-in updating mechanism, like WP has (dokuwiki has a plugin for 
that) to facilitate updating stuff.
At home (as opposed to my remote servers) I tend to install only Debian 
pkgs, except for OmegaT my most used work application, which always 
install from upstream (ours is often 2 years behind the latest),
and I wish they'd put it on github, or gitorious, or similar.

-- 
http://tonybaldwin.me
all tony, all the time

---

From: Kent West <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 13:29:08 -0500

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 11:53 AM, Tony Baldwin <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I like stuff in git repos (like hubzilla, gnu/social, etc) or with its own
> built-in updating mechanism, like WP has (dokuwiki has a plugin for that)
> to facilitate updating stuff.
> pkgs, except for OmegaT my most used work application, which always install
> from upstream (ours is often 2 years behind the latest),
So what I'm hearing is that I should forego using apt/aptitude to install
WordPress, and just install in manually?

Ag, I hate to go that route; I really like having an apt-maintained system.

Is there perhaps a definitive document that explains how WordPress things
are set up in Debian. The /usr/share/wordpress/readme.html starts off by
unpacking the zip file, which tells me that's not the document that
describes The Debian Way. There's no "man wordpress" or "info wordpress".
The online docs I have found haven't convinced me that one is more
definitive than the conflicting another, and even if it did, doesn't seem
to have a good explanation of The Debian Way concerning WordPress.

Thanks!

-- 
Kent West                    <")))><
Westing Peacefully - http://kentwest.blogspot.com

---

From: Eduardo M KALINOWSKI <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2016 13:32:50 -0300

On 19-09-2016 15:29, Kent West wrote:
> Is there perhaps a definitive document that explains how WordPress
> things are set up in Debian. The /usr/share/wordpress/readme.html
> starts off by unpacking the zip file, which tells me that's not the
> document that describes The Debian Way. There's no "man wordpress" or
> "info wordpress". The online docs I have found haven't convinced me
> that one is more definitive than the conflicting another, and even if
> it did, doesn't seem to have a good explanation of The Debian Way
> concerning WordPress.

/usr/share/doc/wordpress/README.Debian

The standard location of Debian-specific instructions for a given package.

-- 
The best you get is an even break.
		-- Franklin Adams

Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 19:56:23 +0000 (UTC)

> describes The Debian Way. There's no "man wordpress" or "info wordpress".

I don't know anything about wordpress.

But I do know that when I want documentation about package FOO, one
place worth looking is

  /usr/share/doc/FOO/

(Notice the "doc/" element in the path.)

> to have a good explanation of The Debian Way concerning WordPress.

There is also a debian wiki page, which also has not yet been
mentioned, that AFAICT undertakes to describe two methods of
installation.

  https://wiki.debian.org/WordPress

Good luck with your project.

---

From: Kent West <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 13:43:04 -0500

> WordPress, and just install in manually?

Oh, I forgot to emphasize my broader question: am I correct in thinking
that pieces of a web server should not be strewn about on the file system,
simply because it conceptually exposes those parts of the file system to
*users*?

Tony, by "$user" ("/home/$user/www"), do you mean something like
"/home/mywidgetfactory/www" for your web site named "My Widget Factory" and
"/home/nutsandbolts/www" for your web site named "Nuts, Bolts, Screws, and
Banana Peels", both sites being served from the same physical (or virtual)
Debian box?

Does each web site need its own complete WordPress installation? (I would
expect some of the WordPress installation to be on various partitions, such
as "/usr/share" and "/usr/lib", but only those portions that are common to
all the WordPress sites, which are configured by the admin once and then
pretty much left alone, but I would expect site-specific info to be away
from those system partitions, and instead be stored some place like
"/home/$user/www", or in my first-attempted case, in
"/home/web/$site_name".)

Thanks!

---

From: David Wright <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 14:36:22 -0500

> > WordPress, and just install in manually?

Neither of those people appear to reveal their update policy or how
they deal with security fixes.

> simply because it conceptually exposes those parts of the file system to

No. The Debian packaging system is designed to take care of tracking
where files are installed, and updating, or even removing, them correctly.

The files are "scattered" to their appropriate locations, but not in a
careless manner. Take a look at the (recently updated) FHS at
http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml
to see why that is so. (Don't download the text version; you need the
formatting to make sense of it.)

Cheers,
David.

---

From: Miles Fidelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 16:42:09 -0400

> they deal with security fixes.

I just use the built in WordPress updater - which takes care of 
everything.  No need to worry about whether some packager has updated 
both the core and every theme and module that I use (guaranteed, they 
haven't).

Now, when it comes to perl based systems, such as the sympa mailing list 
manager (mailman, too for that matter), - better to use cpan to install 
and update all of one's perl system and modules.

As to security fixes - those are far more likely to come from upstream, 
in a timely manner.

Apt is a fantastic package management system, for widely used things, 
that don't change very often.  For anything else, relying on human 
packagers is a recipe for disaster - particularly when dealing with, 
potentially, 3 layers of packaging (the upstream package, an 
intermediate packaging system like cpan, and the Debian repository.)

Miles Fidelman

---

From: Anthony Baldwin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 16:10:00 -0400

> they deal with security fixes.

I use WP's built in updater once/month to keep those up to date, and 
generally keep the debian installation updated at about the same 
frequency with aptitude. the dokuwikis don't get updates as often but 
when there's an update available. I generally install it asap.
with some of those other things, I routinely pulled from github or wherever.

tony

-- 
http://www.baldwinlinguas.com
translations, localization,
multilingual web development
EN, ES, FR, PT