A community article covers installation via an official package, however, I found this to be problematic with modifications and upgrades. I’ve included instructions for both package installation and manual installation.

I’ve made the following assumptions:

• you want to be able to run multiple sites (or at least have the possibility of)
• site document roots exist at /var/www/<sitename>

Dependencies

Ensure any major dependencies are installed:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-gd mysql-server

Apache2 Virtual Hosts

Create a suitable virtual host entry for the site, e.g. /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    ServerName example:80
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com

    <Directory /var/www/example.com>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride Limit Options FileInfo
        DirectoryIndex index.php
    </Directory>

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/example.com-error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/example.com-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Enable the site and restart apache2:

sudo a2ensite example.com
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Installation

By Package

Install using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install wordpress

The application is installed to /usr/share/wordpress, so if you wish to use a sub url (i.e. http://example.com/wordpress) then simply symbolic link to this, e.g.:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/wordpress /var/www/example.com/wordpress

or if you want to run as the root url (i.e. http://example.com/) then use the install location directly in the DocumentRoot and Directory directives in the httpd config.

You need to have a config file for the domain name wordpress is being accessed by, and make symbolic links for any aliases too, e.g.:

sudo cp /usr/share/wordpress/wp-config-sample.php config-example.com.php
sudo ln -s config-example.com.php config-blog.example.com.php
sudo ln -s config-example.com.php config-www.example.com.php

Manually

Install using the following commands:

cd /var/www/example.com
sudo wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
sudo tar xvf latest.tar.gz
sudo rm latest.tar.gz

This will create an instance of wordpress at /var/www/example.com/wordpress which will be serviceable at http://example.com/wordpress. To service as the root url, run the following:

sudo mv wordpress/* .
sudo rmdir wordpress

Create a default configuration from the sample config:

sudo cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Create a .htaccess file for any url mappings:

sudo touch .htaccess

Ensure the correct permissions are given:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .

MySQL setup

Create a suitable database, user and permissions.

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `wordpress`;
CREATE USER 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'wordpresspassword';
GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'wordpresspassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `wordpress`.* TO 'wordpressuser'@'localhost';

Use a suitable database name, username and password - not the above!

Configuration

Database credentials

Modify the configuration file to supply the credentials for the database.

Securing logins and admin site

As described in the Administration Over SSL in the Wordpress Codex, modify the configuration file by adding:

/** Enable SSL */
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);