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 Comments
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myxa78
myxa78
11 years ago

i’m running web server on CX-01 via Paw Server + php plugin, it’s working! 😉

rm
rm
11 years ago

If you tried to make this guide as simple as possible, should’ve used wordpress is packaged in debian, http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/wordpress, simply apt-get install wordpress.

BarryK
BarryK
11 years ago

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

max
max
11 years ago

they have similar thing for android also?

zoobab
11 years ago

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

aguedob
aguedob
11 years ago

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… Read more »

aguedob
aguedob
11 years ago


Thanks for the hint. I had a problem with W3TC configuration. Now is really fast 😉

Raul
11 years ago

raspberrypi (oc 800 Mhz) archlinuxarm + mysql + nginx + php-pfm + apc + w3tc

local network
Requests per second: 281.94 [#/sec] (mean)

internet (ADSL spain)
Requests per second: 10.85 [#/sec] (mean)

check here: http://homepi.sytes.net

Rorto
Rorto
11 years ago

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 =)

Rorto
Rorto
11 years ago

@Rorto
OK it’s pi/raspberry
Sorry.

pe7er
11 years ago

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…

Rob
Rob
11 years ago

@aguedob

Care to share what you did?

tasman
tasman
11 years ago

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?

tasman
tasman
11 years ago

@Jean-Luc Aufranc (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.… Read more »

tasman
tasman
11 years ago

@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… Read more »

markmeson
markmeson
11 years ago

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

acra
acra
11 years ago

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… Read more »

acra
acra
11 years ago

@acra
Found it, I’d made a change in the config but hadn’t cleared my browser cache!

otter9099
otter9099
11 years ago

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.

otter9099
otter9099
11 years ago


Thank you, I will give it a try.

Rune K. Svendsen
11 years ago

Thanks a lot for this guide! I now have my own website running on my Raspberry Pi (I just created the domain some hours ago so it’s not working yet, still waiting :)).

Geoff
10 years ago

@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/’);

Don Porter
Don Porter
10 years ago

@Geoff
Lordy thanks Geoff! Where has this post been for the past year! WP has given me such headaches over IP changes!

Lison
Lison
10 years ago

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

Snide
7 years ago

Hi, nice tutorial 🙂
What is the need of Nginx?
Would you recommend running a wordpress site on a raspberry pi for online use?

Khadas VIM4 SBC