Solved! Moving WordPress to root folder to make it multi-site compatible

I need to use WordPress in multi-site mode and, from reading the WP documentation, I see that it won't work in a sub-folder so I've moved it from the /var/www/wordpress folder to /var/www.

Since this wasn't straightforward, I thought I'd outline the steps (which I discovered through a lot of searching and trial and error):

1) Delete the index.html file in /var/www.

2) Move the files from the /wordpress folder into /var/www.

3) Edit the Apache virtual hosts for ports 80 and 443 to point to /var/www.

4) Edit the directives in the WordPress config file to point to /var/www.

5) In the wp-options table in the wordpress database, change the siteurl and home fields to your site's IP address. Not sure if this is strictly necessary (or even advisable) but I did it and everything seems to be OK.

6) Log onto the web shell and enter the following command: chown -R www-data: /var/www

This last step changes the ownership of the root directory so that WordPress can write to it.

I hope that helps anyone struggling with this.

PS When you convert to multi-site, you will be asked to create a blogs.dir folder and, possibly, an .htaccess file. Make sure you set the ownership of thess to www-data (just like all the other files and folders in /var/www) so that wordpress can access them.

Replies (3)

Good on you for posting back :)

Reply 1 2011-08-13

Thanks for that, hopefully it will help someone else (I'm sure it will). I read your initial post but had nothing useful for you. Only thing I'd suggest is that IMO step 6 would ideally be:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

As it then will be owned by www-data user and www-data group. Obviously your way still works, but I think it is better to explicitly set the group as well.

For clarity (others reading this and finding it useful): You can just run that same command again after creating blogs.dir folder and .htaccess (or any other) file(s). The -R switch makes the chown command recursive ie the folder and all of it's contents.

Great post. Need help though

Reply 2 2012-02-08

Hi Andrew, thanks for the info.

I am new at this and am hoping you can please expand a little on the 4th step.

[ 4) Edit the directives in the WordPress config file to point to /var/www. ]

Opened the file up but haven't a clue what to enter.

Any assistance gratefully accepted.

Thanks

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Update

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Just to let you know.

I seemed to have got it working.

But for step 4 i needed to define '/' and not '/var/www' in the wp-configfile, for it to work.

Hope thats ok

Yeah there has been talk of offerring a lighter weight webserver

Reply 3 2012-02-09

FYI from what the devs have said previously Apache was chosen as the default for TKL appliances because of the (relavative) ease of config as well as the huge amount of documentation available (and generally easier to get help with). Also the fact that there is no Webmin module for NginX makes the bar a little higher too.