Install WordPress on Oracle Cloud For Free

Have you ever wondered how to install WordPress on Oracle Cloud for Free using Always Free Virtual Instance? Oracle Cloud provides Always free services plus a $300 free trial credit for 30-days to use other premium services.

In this tutorial, we will learn, step-by-step methods from deploying Oracle Cloud Instance (OCI) to configuring Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) and then installing WordPress.

Benefits of Using Oracle Cloud Free Tier

Oracle Cloud has a lot of advantages. This gives you a free $300 credit for 30 days when you sign up. And after 30 you can always use the free services of Oracle Cloud. In which you get to use the following services for free:

• Two AMD Compute Instance
• Two Oracle Autonomous Databases
• Two-Block Volumes Storage (200 GB)
• 10 GB Object and Archive Storage Each

Must Read: - Check out, How to Install WordPress on Alibaba Cloud Hosting for Free.

How To Deploy a Virtual Machine on Oracle Cloud?

To deploy the Oracle Cloud instances, you must have an account with the verified payment method. When you sign up for a new account will get $300 free credit for 30 days. In this trial period, you will get access to complete services of Oracle Cloud.

However, if you don’t upgrade the account after the trial period, the service access will be limited. But you will still have the ”Always free services” access, including two AMD-based, compute instances.

So, let’s get started with deploying an always-free server to host a WordPress website.

Step – 1. Go Compute Instance Section

First, log in to the Oracle Cloud dashboard, then click on the menu and select compute instances to create a new one.

Step – 2. Click Create Instance Button

Oracle Cloud gives you to create up to two virtual machines, in the always free tier plan. As shown in the image click on the ‘Create instance’ and then follow the next steps.

Step – 3. Give Instance Name

Give the instance name or just leave it as its default, and don’t forget to select the root compartment.

Step – 4. Select OS Image & Shape

The next step is choosing the operating system, by default Oracle Linux will be selected. It is a great Linux distribution and if you are familiar with CentOS then you can use Oracle Linux to host websites. Perhaps, I suggest you choose Ubuntu operating system as shown in the image above.

Step – 5. Specify Virtual Cloud Network

The next step is choosing a virtual cloud network. You can create a new Oracle Cloud Virtual Cloud Network or choose the existing one.

Step – 6. Add or Upload SSH Keys

This one is a very important step, to connect your virtual machine you must generate an SSH key or upload a key. In other cloud platforms, like Digitial Ocean and Vultr Cloud, you will get the option to set a password.

Step – 7. Specify Boot Volume

Now, you can specify the boot volume size. Oracle Cloud gives you up to two block volumes up to 200 GB size total.

Step – 8. Deploy Oracle Cloud Instance (OCI)

After configuring the settings of the virtual machine, click on create to deploy. After a few seconds, the instance will be up and running.

Please note the public IP address and the system username. It will be required to connect the system and route the domain name for the website.

How To Install WordPress on Oracle Cloud Free Virtual Machine?

After deploying the Oracle Cloud instance, you can create any type of project. In this tutorial, step-by-step I have explained, how to install WordPress.

Step – 1. Connect System using SSH

To install WordPress, you must connect to the system using SSH. First, open your PC’s terminal or PowerShell, then use the following command:

ssh -i '.\<private_key_file>' ubuntu@public_ip_address

Step – 2. Allow Web Traffic in Iptables Firewall

sudo iptables -I INPUT 6 -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

sudo iptables -I INPUT 6 -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

sudo netfilter-persistent save

Oracle Cloud uses Iptables Netfilter firewall, if you even whitelist the HTTP and HTTPS port on network security group on VCN. So, you must execute both commands to enable web traffics.

Step – 3. Install LAMP Stack

To install a WordPress site on a virtual machine, there are various methods to it. Like you can use LAMP or LEMP Stack for it. These stacks include all necessary applications that are required to install WordPress. The LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP respectively.
To proceed with further steps, please check out how to install the LAMP stack on Ubuntu.

Step – 4. Create Database

First, you must log in to MySQL using the root credentials, which you have already created during the MySQL installation. Use the following command to login MySQL:

sudo mysql -u root -p

Create New Database: Replace wordpress with your preferred database name.

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

Create User and Set Password: Replace wp_user with your preferred database username and password with your preferred strong password.

CREATE USER 'wp_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Grant Privileges:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wp_user'@'localhost';

Flush Privileges:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

exit;

Step – 5. Create WordPress Root Directory

Replace wordpress with your preferred directory name. And when you create a new Apache virtual host configuration file, you must mention this directory path as the website root directory.

sudo mkdir /var/www/html/wordpress

Step – 6. Download WordPress Installation Files & Extract

Use the change directory command to get the root directory.

cd

Now, using the following command you can download the latest WordPress source code compressed tar file.

sudo wget -c https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Extract WordPress Installation Files:

sudo tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

Step – 7. Copy Extracted Files to WordPress Directory

There are various methods on Linux to copy-paste files, but using the following rsync command you can copy-paste files between directories. Replace the highlighted wordpress directory name if you created a different one.

sudo rsync -avP ~/wordpress/ /var/www/html/wordpress

Step – 8. Give Proper Permission & Ownership to the Apache

Using the following commands you will give proper read & write and directory ownership to the Apache HTTP server. It is necessary to install plugins, and themes, and upload media files on WordPress.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wordpress/

sudo chmod 755 -R /var/www/html/wordpress/

Step – 9. Configure Apache Virtual Host

Apache Virtual Host is a directive file, and it allows you to host more than one website on a single virtual machine that uses Apache HTTP Server.

Create a New Virtual Host Config File:

Replace wordpress.conf with your preferred config name. You can also use your domain name to distinguish between multiple config files.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf

Paste the Following Lines of Code to it: You must replace the example.com domain name with your actual domain name to work the virtual host file. In case you don’t want to add your domain name then remove the two lines ServerName and ServerAlias.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/wordpress
    <Directory /var/www/html/wordpress/>
        Require all granted
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
   ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
   CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Enable Apache Rewrite Module:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Enable New Created Virtual Host:

sudo a2ensite wordpress.conf

Restart Apache HTTP Server:

sudo service apache2 restart

Step – 10. Configure WordPress (Post Configuration)

This is the final step, after all the settings are up, now, you have to configure WordPress with the database, which we have created earlier in step 4.

FAQs

Summary

The steps given in this tutorial will help to install WordPress on Oracle Cloud for free, you just need a valid always free tier (or a premium) account.

However, on the Oracle Cloud VM, you can install other types of applications, similar to WordPress.
If you have any issues regarding installing WordPress please feel free to contact me.