title: Installing WordPress
date: 2018-03-13 18:00
tags: WordPress
summary: Setting up WordPress!
---

Hello, world!

Installing Wordpress from a linode account can be a bit of a chore, but I've done it again!

The main issue that I had was that WordPress wouldn't automatically update for
me.  I've remembered running into this issue before, and Wordpress has a section
on it on their
[codex](https://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress#One-click_Update).
Essentially: WordPress determines what method it will use to connect
to the filesystem of your server based on the file ownership of your WordPress
files. If the files are owned by the owner of the current process (i.e., the
user under which the web server is running), and new files created by WordPress
will also be owned by that user, WordPress will directly modify the files all by
itself, without asking you for credentials.

So all I had to do was figure out what worker process nginx was running under. 
After chatting on
#debian or irc.freenode.net for a second, a user said that their worker process
was `www-data`.  And indeed cat `/etc/passwd` shows that there is a user `www-data`
on my system.  And `/etc/nginx.conf` said user `www-data`; All I had to do to get it
to work was a `cd /var/html/www/;  sudo chown -R www-data` . And now WordPress
will handle updates automatically!   Coolio!
