I will be posting a series of articles on my experience with getting up and running with WordPress. In this post, I’ll outline the steps I went through to get WordPress up and running on my Ubuntu Web Server, but first a bit of background about why I’d even want to do this.

Background

I’m setting up a blog to document some of my interests and various activities I’m involved in (you may have already guessed that since you’re already reading my blog). I have a hosting provider that allows me to setup and use WordPress fairly easily via a simple cPanel installation. Setup was pretty much a breeze and I was up and running with WordPress 2.9.2 in less than a minute or so.

One of the things I’ve always liked to have though is a sandbox environment. I’ve got a home network that consists of various salvaged and cobbled together machines, most of which run Ubuntu’s server distribution, and one of them is a “web server” set aside just for this type of thing.

I went about installing WordPress via apt-get as described in Ubuntu’s community documentation. Everything worked well and good and the documentation was clear, but the version currently maintained in the Ubuntu repo is WordPress 2.8.4. I really would prefer to match up versions between my hosting provider and my sandbox, and in the future I’d like to upgrade my sandbox and actual blog along with WordPress releases rather than the Ubuntu repo.

Requirements

So that left me with the need to install WordPress from the latest WordPress.org distribution for my sandbox. I had a couple goals in mind for this setup.

• The ability to install the latest WordPress releases as they come out.
• The installation should co-exist alongside the Ubuntu WordPress instance I already installed
• The installation should adhere to the debian-ish standards already in use on my web server
• The installation should be accessible via it’s own DNS name on my home network