Unix — Setup WordPress on Apache PHP5 through Nginx Reverse Proxy

Set up WordPress running on Apache through an Nginx reverse proxy.

Assuming you have apache2 installed, grab the relevant PHP5 libraries:
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5, php5

Set up Apache

Set up an apache VirtualHost that listens on some port, say 8080.


Listen 8088

ServerName Blah
DocumentRoot /path/to/wordpress

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All

Set AllowOverride to allow wordpress to use .htaccess.

mod rewrite

You may need to install the apache rewrite module.
locate mod_rewrite.so revealed I have mod_rewrite in /usr/lib/apache2/mod_rewrite.so, so I added a file in /etc/apache2/mods-enabledthat contained:

LoadModule rewrite_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so

Set up Nginx

Next up is to proxy some address to the apache server listening on 8080.

Set up a location in your nginx server configuration files to point proxy_pass the traffic to your apache server.
Inside your server directive, you’d have something like:
location /my-blog/ {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
proxy_redirect off;
# more settings...
}

and bam!

visit /my-blog/ and your wordpress should start.

Modify wordpress to use new addresses

WordPress doesn’t know it’s living in a subdirectory because the request is proxied from Nginx.

You can fix the links from pointing at the root domain by modifying the home and home_url settings in the wp_options table to include yourdomain.com/my-blog

(also found in the general settings tab of WP admin)

Finally, one last fix with nginx for wp-admin bugginess

It seems the admin isn’t 100% good at dealing with WP living in a subdirectory. It tends to send me off to the root domain for searches and various other misc links.

I fixed this by making a rewrite rule in nginx that directs all traffic from /wp-admin to /my-blog/wp-admin/.

location /wp-admin/ {
rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/my-blog/$1 permanent;
}

Finally, we have our blog..