Automate WordPress installation with HHVM + Nginx + Varnish in Ubuntu 14.04

Also optimized to work fine with WordPress permalinks.

About Varnish

Varnish Cache is an HTTP accelerator (also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy) and a useful tool for speeding up a server, especially during a times when there is high traffic to a site.

It works by redirecting visitors to static pages whenever possible and only drawing on the server itself if there is a need for an active process.

In this automation Varnish is really optimized to don't cache the wp-admin/wp-login and invalidate the cache of pages and posts every time them are modified.

This occurs when editing, publishing, commenting or deleting an item, and when changing themes.

Extra features

• FTP Server to auto-install plugins, themes, etc
• SMTP Server to be allowed to send mails
• Swap partition
• Best permalink format configured for SEO

Requirements

Ansible: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_installation.html#installing-the-control-machine

Installation with Vagrant

Vagrant creates a new virtual machine

Install the following dependencies:

• VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
• Vagrant: http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
• Vagrant plugins: (Install them executing in a shell the following commands):
  • vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
  • vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater

Then execute vagrant up in your terminal (You must be in this project directory path)

You can access to your new blog opening http://blog.vagrant or http://www.blog.vagrant in your browser.

Also you will be able to log-in with ssh in your new virtual machine executing vagrant ssh.

Local installation in your server

You should run this in your server.

First configure the ansible/config/production.yml file to set your correct server domains.

Then execute ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -c local -i ansible/config/host_local --extra-vars=@ansible/config/production.json" in your terminal (You must be in this project directory path)

You can access to your new blog opening http://yourowndomain.com in your browser.

Remote provisioning on an existent machine

Edit your ansible/config/host_production file and set the domain of your machine.

Then execute the following command:

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -i ansible/config/host_production --extra-vars=@ansible/config/production.json --user root --ask-pass

The --user root indicates the user to log in via ssh

The --ask-pass will ask you for the ssh password, if you are using a ssh key ignore this parameter

If you use the --ask-pass in Mac OS X, and you get the following error:

to use the 'ssh' connection type with passwords, you must install the sshpass program,

follow the next instructions:

http://thornelabs.net/2014/02/09/ansible-os-x-mavericks-you-must-install-the-sshpass-program.html

Remote installation in DigitalOcean with Packer

Download Packer from http://www.packer.io/downloads.html

And install it: http://www.packer.io/intro/getting-started/setup.html

(It's simple, move the downloaded packer binary in to /usr/local/bin/, or into the binary path which you want)

Create a new copy of the packer.json.dist file: cp packer.json.dist packer.json

Create a new Personal Access Token from https://cloud.digitalocean.com/settings/tokens/new

And change the following line in your new packer.json.dist:

"api_token": "put_your_digitalocean_api2_token_here",

Then execute: packer build packer.json.dist

This will create a new digitalocean image (https://cloud.digitalocean.com/images) ready to use (You can use this image when you create a new droplet)