Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 33 Comments on WordPress for Raspberry Pi using Nginx and MySQL

WordPress for Raspberry Pi using Nginx and MySQL

I’ve been wondering how the Raspberry Pi would handle WordPress. I’ve found some instructions using Apache 2, but this may not be the best server to use for this type of low-end hardware. nginx server requires less resources, and as it is what I already setup for this blog, I decided to give it a try on the Pi.

I’ll provide all the detailed steps I followed below, but you can also download the compressed SD card image (113 MB), uncompress it and copy it to an SD card the usual way. After the system boots, find your Raspberry Pi’s IP address, type it in your PC’s browser, and you should see the page pictured below. If you want to login to the dashboard, the username is “admin” and the password “raspberry”.

Instructions to Install WordPress on Raspberry Pi

You can use your default Debian Linux distribution (e.g. Raspbian) if space if not an issue, but all what I did below is based on Raspbian minimal image.

Install ngnix, php and mysql in the server:


You’ll be asked for mysql root password. I used “raspberry” of course!

Create a nginx configuration file for your WordPress blog in /etc/nginx/sites-available/wordpress:


Enable your wordpress blog:


As mentioned in the note in the config file above, edit /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini to enable the line:


You can try if nginx is running properly at this point, first start it:


and try to access it from your PC’s browser using Raspberry Pi IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.106), you should see:

Welcome to nginx!

Now let’s download and extract WordPress into the RPi:


Now let’s follow WordPress installation instructions:


In /srv/www/wordpress/public_html directory edit WordPress configuration:


and update the database details as follows:


Finally change the directory permissions and start(or restart) nginx and php5-fpm.


Now access the following IP address in your PC’s web browser

http://192.168.0.106/wp-admin/install.php

Where you need to replace 192.168.0.106 with your Raspberry Pi IP address.

WordPress Installation Page Rendered on the Raspberry Pi

Fill the details (I used “raspberry” password), click on Install WordPress, and follow the  installation instructions in your browser. You should now be able to login to the Dashboard and create a post. For better performance, I’ve installed W3 Total Cache plugin, and enabled Page, Browser and Object caching. Once caching is enabled, the pages should load immediately (less than a second) for non-logged in users. I did experience one issue with caching enabled but not working. This was solved by clearing my browser cookies. Go figure. Since the dashboard is not cached, editing posts and adding pictures is somewhat slow but still usable.

WordPress Benchmarks on Raspberry Pi

Finally, I’ve done some benchmarks on the main page using ApacheBench from another Linux machine on the LAN with 10 concurrent users making 100 requests:


With this simple WordPress page, the Raspberry Pi can handle 3.44 Requests per second, which is equivalent to around 12,400 requests per hour or nearly 300,000 requests per day.

You might want to try to further improve performance by using PHP APC and Varnish, or replacing MySQL with SQLite3.

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33 Replies to “WordPress for Raspberry Pi using Nginx and MySQL”

  4. Puppy Linux has PPLOG, which is a single Perl script, that uses it’s own plain-text filing system (no database required).

    This is also in the Puppy port for the Raspberry Pi, but I haven’t actually got around to testing it.

    Here is the official PPLOG website, but note that our script has some enhancements:
    http://code.google.com/p/pplog/

    My own blog is powered by PPLOG:
    http://bkhome.org/blog/

    It is so tiny, most builds of Puppy have it. it is great as a personal blog, even if you don’t want to publish it on the Internet.

    Our package is here:
    http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/pet_packages-noarch/pplog-1.1.3.pet

    Regards,
    Barry

    Reply

  7. wordpress has a static cache plugin if i am not mistaken, that could improve the stats of the apache stress tool.

    Reply

  9. I followed you tutorial but it seems that my raspberry is almost ten times slower than yours! Look at my benchmark with only 10 requests. Any clue?

    $ ab -n 10 -c 10 http://192.168.2.251/blog/
    This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3
    Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
    Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

    Benchmarking 192.168.2.251 (be patient)…..done

    Server Software: nginx/1.2.1
    Server Hostname: 192.168.2.251
    Server Port: 80

    Document Path: /blog/
    Document Length: 6547 bytes

    Concurrency Level: 10
    Time taken for tests: 35.848 seconds
    Complete requests: 10
    Failed requests: 0
    Write errors: 0
    Total transferred: 67690 bytes
    HTML transferred: 65470 bytes
    Requests per second: 0.28 [#/sec] (mean)
    Time per request: 35847.697 [ms] (mean)
    Time per request: 3584.770 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
    Transfer rate: 1.84 [Kbytes/sec] received

    Connection Times (ms)
    min mean[+/-sd] median max
    Connect: 6 1715 5398.6 7 17079
    Processing: 0 24990 11966.4 33862 35837
    Waiting: 0 24988 11966.0 33860 35835
    Total: 17079 26705 8806.5 33868 35847

    Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50% 33868
    66% 34585
    75% 34995
    80% 35608
    90% 35847
    95% 35847
    98% 35847
    99% 35847
    100% 35847 (longest request)

    Reply

  10. @aguedob
    Can you check caching is working, by verifying some files are created in wp-content/plugins/w3tc/pgcache or objcache directory? (Not sure exactly of the dir but should be similar).

    Reply

  14. In the SD image you provide the IP adress for wordpress is 192.168.0.106 and i want to modify it.
    Could you provide ssh access info ?

    Thanks =)

    Reply

  16. Thanks for your installation description for nginx!
    I am installing it to run it on my Rasberry Pi with Joomla 🙂

    I had some problems with installing mysql with “sudo apt-get install mysql”

    Only after some searching I found: “sudo apt-get install mysql-server”, and then I noticed that
    you also mentioned “mysql-server” but my browser didn’t display the “-server” part on your site…

    Reply

  18. as long as I access the blog within the same network everything is fine (response time ~2-3sec).
    When I try to access it over the internet (I changed WordPress/Settings/General/ home/site URL to my dyndns URL), responses are very slow />30 sec.
    DSL speed shouldn’t be the limiting factor – accessing a static html (that I placed in the public_html folder) over the internet was fast….

    Any ideas?

    Reply

  20. @cnxsoft
    Thanks for the link. This helped…in a way:
    I did the test and the strange thing is: after the initial request there are several calls to the local/private IP of my raspberry PI which can’t (and shouldn’t) be resolved.
    But where do these strange URLs come from:
    e.g. http://192.168.2.104/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve/js/html5.js

    I even added my dyndns to WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL in the wp-config.php.

    remark: There seems to be some problem with my router: I can’t connect to my dyndns URL from within the lan. But this shouldn’t be a problem when accessing the wordpress site from the outside, e.g. using the webpagetest.

    Reply

  21. @tasman
    after some googling I finally found the solution:

    originally I had the private IP(http://192.168.2.10) configured as site-url and wp-home. Later on I did change them to my dyndns through the admin frontend.
    There seems to be a conflict between entries in the config-file and configuration through the admin frontend:

    When I executed this in mysql (in wordpress db):
    SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name IN (‘siteurl’, ‘home’);
    …the result showed that siteurl still contained the private IP. I.e. my config-entries were ignored!

    Finally I updated the db to use my dyndns url.
    update wp_options set option_value = “http://mydomain” where option_name=’siteurl’;

    Additionally I updated another table to adjust the previous content-uploads.
    UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content =
    REPLACE(post_content,”http://192.168.2.10″,”http://mydomain”);

    The result: My page loads quite fast and without errors – next step: reactivate the cache!
    Thanks again for your tip regarding webpagetest. This helped a lot.

    Reply

  22. this config file doesn’t work for me. using the one on the nginx site (example for wordpress sites) works fine.

    Reply

  23. Getting a weird issue – I’m able to navigate to the installer, and go through that successfully. I’m also able to then navigate to the CP and make changes – but as soon as I head to the root site eg subdomain.domain.com my browser simply downloads a file called “download.file” which contains this:

    <?php
    /**
    * Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
    * wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
    *
    * @package WordPress
    */

    /**
    * Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
    *
    * @var bool
    */
    define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);

    /** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
    require('./wp-blog-header.php');

    What am I doing wrong?

    Reply

  25. Hi,

    I tried your image and I am very impressed with it. Makes the RP very useable as a WordPress Server. However I had to use the same network configuration as you in order to access WordPress (ie 192.168.0.106). Which configuration file holds this setting? My educated guess is it is something in WordPress because the page starts to load using my network settings of 10.0.0.x but the address for WordPress auto changes to 192.168.0.106 and only loads a few text based items. Any help would be much appreciated.

    Reply

  26. @otter9099
    I guess WordPress uses the IP address during installation. I’m not exactly sure where it’s stored, or if it can be changed in the dashboard.
    The fast way could be to install it yourself.

    Reply

  29. @Rorto

    @otter9099

    Gents, you can manually define the site’s URL using the wp-config.php file in the root of the wordpress install.

    sudo nano /srv/www/wordpress/public_html/wp-config.php

    Then, add the following lines to your file, replacing the x’s with your pi’s URL.

    define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://192.168.x.xxx/’);
    define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://192.168.x.xxx/’);

    Reply

  31. hello,
    i followed this post to build my php environment, and it works with port 80. but now i want change the port to 8000.
    i am fresh with pi and linux, even nginx.

    what i have done is change the settings “listen” in
    “/etc/nginx/sites-enabled”
    and
    “/etc/nginx/sites-available”
    to 8000.

    then i restart nginx and php5-fpm, and i got no iptables. but it not work,i cannot access my site with the http address.

    when i use command: telnet myip 8000, and type Ctrl+C, it shows me 400 bad request.

    can you tell me what should i do? Thank you

    Reply

  33. @Snide
    Nginx simply replaces Apache, as it is supposed to use less memory. My Raspberry Pi board had 256 MB RAM at the time.
    You can run WordPress site on a Raspberry Pi for online use as long as it does not get too many hits.

    Reply

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