How to Install WordPress with LEMP on Ubuntu 26.04

To install WordPress with LEMP on Ubuntu 26.04, set up Nginx, PHP-FPM, and MariaDB first, then WordPress on example.com.

Step 1 : You need Nginx, PHP-FPM, and MariaDB first (see those guides).

Step 2 : Open the MariaDB shell.

sudo mysql

Step 3 : Create the database and user (change strong_password if you want).

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
CREATE USER 'wordpress'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpress'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Step 4 : Download WordPress into the site root.

cd /tmp
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com
sudo cp -a /tmp/wordpress/. /var/www/example.com/
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example.com

Step 5 : Point the server block root at /var/www/example.com (Server Blocks guide), or:

sudo tee /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com <<'EOF'
server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name example.com;
    root /var/www/example.com;
    index index.php index.html;
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.5-fpm.sock;
    }
    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}
EOF

Step 6 : Enable the site, test, and restart.

sudo ln -sfn /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com
sudo nginx -t
sudo systemctl restart nginx
sudo systemctl restart php8.5-fpm