Technical stuff from a bit-head

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How I installed WordPress 3.4.2 on CentOS 5.8

by · October 3, 2012

Had a real adventure getting a WordPress site going on a CentOS 5.8 LAMP server. It came down to two major areas: packages and permissions.

Packages

I asked the hosting provider to install pretty much just the base package group, knowing we could easily add on from there without having a lot of extra fluff. After a fair amount of troubleshooting (and very patient help from the site developer), I ended up installing the list below. Some of them may be unnecessary in the end, and many were pulled in as dependencies, but we got there.

perl-DBD-MySQL-3.0007-2.el5.x86_64
mysql-server-5.0.95-1.el5_7.1.x86_64
mod_auth_mysql-3.0.0-3.2.el5_3.x86_64
ntp-4.2.2p1-15.el5.centos.1.x86_64
php53-common-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-cli-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-pdo-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-mbstring-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-mysql-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-xmlrpc-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-xml-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php53-gd-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
gd-progs-2.0.33-9.4.el5_4.2.x86_64
libwmf-0.2.8.4-10.2.x86_64
libcroco-0.6.1-2.1.x86_64
lcms-1.18-0.1.beta1.el5_3.2.x86_64
libgsf-1.14.1-6.1.x86_64
librsvg2-2.16.1-1.el5.x86_64
urw-fonts-2.3-6.1.1.noarch
ghostscript-8.70-14.el5_8.1.x86_64
ghostscript-fonts-5.50-13.1.1.noarch
ImageMagick-6.2.8.0-15.el5_8.x86_64
libdrm-2.0.2-1.1.x86_64
libXxf86vm-1.0.1-3.1.x86_64
mesa-libGL-6.5.1-7.10.el5.x86_64
libjpeg-devel-6b-37.x86_64
libXau-devel-1.0.1-3.1.x86_64
bzip2-devel-1.0.3-6.el5_5.x86_64
ghostscript-devel-8.70-14.el5_8.1.x86_64
libtiff-devel-3.8.2-15.el5_8.x86_64
lcms-devel-1.18-0.1.beta1.el5_3.2.x86_64
xorg-x11-proto-devel-7.1-13.el5.x86_64
libXdmcp-devel-1.0.1-2.1.x86_64
libX11-devel-1.0.3-11.el5_7.1.x86_64
libXext-devel-1.0.1-2.1.x86_64
libICE-devel-1.0.1-2.1.x86_64
libSM-devel-1.0.1-3.1.x86_64
libXt-devel-1.0.2-3.2.el5.x86_64
mesa-libGL-devel-6.5.1-7.10.el5.x86_64
ImageMagick-devel-6.2.8.0-15.el5_8.x86_64
imake-1.0.2-3.x86_64
autoconf-2.59-12.noarch
automake-1.9.6-2.3.el5.noarch
php53-devel-5.3.3-13.el5_8.x86_64
php-pear-1.4.9-8.el5.noarch

Also, I had to run ‘pecl install imagick‘.  Newer versions of WordPress require PHP 5.2 and newer.  CentOS provides 5.1 by default, but Red Hat back-ported 5.3 as php53 to accommodate the fact that so many things need it.  One major discovery was that image resizing will break without ‘gd’ support.  This came thru the php53-gd package, as well as the ImageMagic stuff.

Permissions, ownership, etc.

Like many web hosting setups, the apache user needs to be able to read directories, execute files, and in some cases write things.  After lots of trial and error, we settled on these principles:

  • The directory wp-content (and its subdirectories) is owned by the site user, and is in the apache group
  • The site owner is a member of the apache group as an additional group (i.e. usermod -a -G apache user).  You could also just make the apache group the primary group of the site user (usermod -g apache user).
  • All directories under wp-content are setgid (chmod g+s), and are mode 775.
  • All files are mode 664 (644 if you’re a bit paranoid, and for all .php files, but keep an eye out for things that break).

 

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