Having hosted this blog on a tiny AWS EC2 instance for some time, mostly to gain exposure to EC2, I decided to migrate it to a spare Raspberry Pi and use my home network connection. For the most part this was a fairly seamless transition.
Raspberry Pi Preparation
Basic setup was updating and locking down the RPI. The next step was to install a webserver. Rather then Apache2, I decided to install nginx instead as it is supposed to be a little lighter on resources.
sudo apt-get install nginx php5-fpm
sudo service nginx restart
Try to connect to http://$SERVER_IP and you should see a “Welcome to NGINX” page. If not then something has gone wrong and you need to look at /var/log/nginx/error.log
Next up is to install MySQL and the PHP connection API
sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql
Be sure to set a strong MySQL root password
At this point I suggest switching your MySQL config with the my-small.cnf as we are working on a relatively low memory device
sudo cp /usr/share/doc/mysql-server-5.5/examples/my-small.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf
sudo service mysql restart
Prepare the WordPress MySQL Account
mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE `wordpressdb`;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `wordpressdb`.* TO 'wordpress'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'long_complicated_wordpress_password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT
At this point I configured nginx to allow PHP to be executed by editing /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default in two areas:
server {
listen 80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
#listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
root /var/www;
index index.html index.htm index.php;
...
# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
# # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini
#
# # With php5-cgi alone:
# fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
# # With php5-fpm:
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}
WordPress Migration
For this I made use of the excellent XCloner Plugin to backup my existing server, then used the manual method to restore the entire wordpress installation on the new server. No issues…
Some Performance Improvements
First some caching helpers:
sudo apt-get install memcached php5-memcache php-apc
sudo /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart
To take advantage in WordPress install the following plugins:
- nginx Compatibility
- W3 Total Cache
From the W3 Total Cache settings page
- enable Page Cache with memcached
- enable Object Cache with APC
Moving the RRD
First up, install rrdtool on the RPI:
sudo apt-get install rrdtool
Then dump the old RRD from the original server. This is required as the database itself is very platform specific, and cannot be just copied between architectures.
rrdtool dump ./database.rrd > database.xml
On the new server, import it into a shiny new RRD:
rrdtool restore ./database.xml ./database.rrd
DNS Changes
Since this is hosted on a home connection, which has a public IP, we cannot guarantee that the IP address will stay the same. Like most tech-savy people I use Dynamic DNS to ensure I can access my home network.
In this case, I make a CNAME record for flat-planet.net, pointing towards my dynamic DNS record, and we are done.
