How-To: Permalink with Ubuntu LAMP

WordPress Permalinks with Ubuntu LAMP

Enabling permalinks in Wordpress is not to difficult, if your server configuration is precisely correct. If it was like mine, however, you may be in for a frustrating few hours. There are permissions to be hacked on, conf files to change, and apache mods to be enabled. This is a quick and dirty guide to enabling those search engine friendly permalinks on a typical Ubuntu LAMP installation.

What You Need

  • Sudo access to server
  • Minimal terminal expertise
  • Internet connection
  • This guide

What You Do

Run the following commands

First, to enable the rewrite module in Apache2

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Then to get the .htaccess file to work, open the defaults config file

sudo nano /etc/apache2/site-available/defaults

Find the line that says:

AllowOverride None

and edit it so that it reads:

AllowOverride All

Tip: ctl+x to exit, hit ‘y’ to save your changes!

Next we need to create an .htaccess file

sudo nano /var/www/.htaccess

This assumes that your wordpress blog is in your root www folder. If not change the file path to your root

That’s all, we just needed to create it, wordpress can do the hard work of putting something in there. To allow Wordpress to make changes, however we need to (briefly) change the permissions on the file. Do this with this command

sudo chmod 777 /var/www/.htaccess

Perfect. Now to restart Apache to get all those changes worked in,

sudo /etc/init.ed/apache2 restart

This should restart without Apache without any errors. Now navigate to your blogs admin page, go to ‘permalinks’ under ’settings’ and select how you want your permalinks to look. Do not forget to hit ‘Save’ down at the bottom! There should be no errors when you hit save.

Now, you need to change those permissions back, we certainly don’t want anyone to be able to change and execute our .htaccess!

sudo chmod 644 /var/www/.htaccess

Should just about fix you up. Hopefully this is helpful.


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