The whole point of this post is to get Wordpress installed on your slice at Slicehost as quickly as possible. This was my first time doing so and I figured I should create a shell script to complete the process if my slice ever crashed and burned. Skip to the bottom if you want to get right to it.

I love Slicehost. The plans are relatively inexpensive and you know what you're going to get. Recently, my wife wanted to setup a blog and I really didn't feel comfortable setting it up for her on a shared host. She likes it when websites are responsive, who doesn't.

I wanted to keep my costs to a minimum on slicehost, so I opted for the 256 slice. That being said, I needed to keep the memory usage as low as possible. That meant that Apache was out the door and in came nginx. It's been a while since I've had to install php. Let's face it, I'm a ruby guy. Anyway, I'll review the setup and then tell you what the install script does and the assumptions made.

The Setup

• PHP 5.3.1
• PHP-fpm 0.6
• Wordpress 2.9.2
• Nginx

Assumptions

• Youre logged in as root
• Using Ubuntu 9.10
• Starting from a newly created slice
• You have a hostname to use for the install

What are steps in the bash script?

• Collect new passwords for root account, a new user account, and the mysql database
• Collect the hostname from the terminal
• Reset the root password
• Create the new user and it to the sudo list
• Update sshd configuration based on this configuration
• Update iptables
• Upgrade the system
• Install needed libraries to compile php
• Download PHP 5.3.1, PHP-FPM, and libevent
• Patch PHP with PHP-FPM (more info on php-fpm here, here and here)
• Compile PHP and install
• Create config file for nginx
• Install Wordpress

Get the bash script

Enjoy the script!