Tong Family

OK I had a chance to redo a droplet installation and I’m trying to make this the minimum path. There are so many different pieces that you need to know, so here is a guide that should help:

1. First of all you need to buy a domain name. I use namecheap.com for this. With some many TLD (top level domains), it’s never been easier to find a good name. The word is way beyond .com now or .io for that matter.
2. Now you need to go to the domain manager and set the name server to ns1.digitalocean.com and 'ns2.digitalocean.com this redirects the name service to those servers.
3. Now login to your Digital Ocean console and go to the networking section and choose Add a domain and pick your domain name. Digital Ocean will want some validation from the name server to do this, so you will need to get a code.
4. You are now ready to create a droplet, so go to Droplet and choose Create and then go to the marketplace section and look for WordPress and then scroll down and choose the droplet size. This is something you can change later. They give you the $40/month as a first option, but don’t be fooled, you can scroll back all the way down to the $5/month option.
5. Make sure to pick do weekly backup as well, it stores four images and costs 20% of the droplet cost.
6. You want to upload your SSH public key into the system now, so that you can just ssh in easily.
7. Once this is up, with that IP address, you want to go back to the network section and for the domain set up an A record that points your_new.domain to droplet_ip_address.
8. You want to do the same for www by creating a CNAME which is the DNS way of saying an alias points to your_new.domain
9. Now you have to wait for that to propagate around the internet if this was a change from. I’ve had to wait up to a day for all this to propagate, but you can check with with a ping your_new.domain and see if you get anything.
10. Now choose create and sit back and wait. Eventually, it will give you an ip address and you want to ssh root@_that_ip_address
11. You should also create a floating IP address and bind it to this droplet. That way if you lose the droplet or want to test one, the IP address for your site never changes.

Now you are going deep into the WordPress specific installation:

1. The droplet has some very important facts in the login screen so don’t ignore them. You should get be able to login right in via SSH key if you added that key to your DigitalOcean section.
2. You will be asked to create an administrator and a password, keep this around in 1Password
3. Now at each step, you want to stop the droplet and then take a snapshot. That way if you make a mistake, you can just Destroy/Rebuild from that image. It saves lots of debugging time to have checkpoints!!!!
4. The first is that if you are going to use WordPress.com and JetPack, you need to turn on XMLRPC by a2disconf block-xmlrpc
5. Also it will run certbot automatically, this requires the DNS is set properly and it will grab an free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. Also, it will setup automatic renewal.
6. Also it will ask you if it should redirect all unencrypted http traffic to https this is really recommended for security reasons.
7. At this point, you should be able to browser to get to the wp-admin user interface.
8. Beware, if you think this is a good time to change the URL to something that you like. For instance the default is just newsite.com which works way better. If you change it to www.newsite.com, then you get a confused WordPress that thinks you are going to the wrong site. The reason is that when ou type netsite.com, it doesn’t know to redirect to www.newsite.com, but does it correctly the other way around.

Now if you want to go to multisite, you need to turn that on by editing /var/www/html/wp-config.php and adding just above the “That’s all” line and make sure you have the semicolon, the site will not come up with it as all php syntax errors cause WordPress to fail.

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Now when you refresh or go to https://your_site.domain/wp-admin to get to the administrative user interface:

1. You should see a new entry in Tools/Network/Setup. You now need to deactivate plugins, the default one is WP fail2ban
2. You will now have a set of tough choices that are a little confusing. That is do you want sub-domains or sub-directory organization. If you have a true network of sites like cars.directory.com and bikes.directory.com and so forth like a Myspace or Facebook site, then subdomains make sense, but then you will need to add something to your DNS system. However, if you really want it to be separate systems, then using sub-directories makes more sense
3. Note that if you already have content in your WordPress installation, then you will have to use subdomains because your site will already have names like yoursite.com/blogpost and this will conflict with the subdirectory view of the world
4. The main advantage of the subdomain world is that if you are really hosting multiple domains on a single site, then this makes the most sense. It is also how bluehost works. What you see as calvintong.com for instance is really calvin.richtong.com there although you never see that real name.
5. However to do this your DNS must be able to support wildcarding of CNAMES, so you need to set * to point to your main domain.
6. After you set this up, go to Tools/Network/SEtup and choose subdomains and press install. Note you need to do this *AFTER* you setup the wildcard domains.
7. If it is working, it should say all is good and then you need to add some things to config files above the ‘That’s all line’ in /var/www/html/wp-config.php and then replace .htacess

Now put into .htaccess

// Point this wherever you'd like, but consider using your install's parent domain.
define( 'NOBLOGREDIRECT', 'https://domain.com/' );