2019-05-01_Linux_Format

72 LXF249 May 2019 http://www.linuxformat.com

TUTORIALS WordPress to static HTML

selectthe$5instance.Chooseanappropriate

datacentre(wesuggestchoosingtheonethat’smost

geographicallyclosetoyou)andclickthegreenSubmit

bar.Shortlyaftersubmittingtherequestyoushould

receiveanemailwiththerootpassword.

It’spossibletousepublic/privatekeystologin,but

thespecificsmayvarybyvendor.We’llimplementa

public/privatekeysetupforourservermanually.

TheemailshouldcontainboththeserverIPand

addressandrootpassword.Logintotheserverusing

thefollowingcommandintheterminalwindow:

sshroot@<ipaddress>

AssumingyoutrustthisIP,it willaskyoutoaccept

thefingerprint.Oninitialloginyou’llneedtochangethe

password.Enterthepasswordandconfirmit.Allbeing

wellyou’llbeloggedintotheserverasroot.Thiscanbe

confirmedbyusingthecommandwhoami. Thiswill

confirmthecurrentuserloggedin.

Thefirststepistoupdatetheservertoinclude

thelatestpatchesandreboot.Performthiswiththe

following commands:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

reboot

The next step is to configure users, because being

logged in as the root user for most purposes is not a

good idea from a security stance. Create a user with

the following command and set a password for it.

useradd -m adminuser -s /bin/bash

passwd adminuser

The next step is to add the user to the sudoers,

the users who can elevate their rights and run

administrative command using the sudo command.

Luckily, this is quite straightforward:

usermod -aG sudo adminuser

Verify this is working by using the command:

id adminuser

This command should give a list of the groups the

user belongs to: one of them should be sudo. It should

now be quite straightforward to log in using the admin

user and the new password, using SSH as we did

before: ssh adminuser@ip_address. Test that the sudo

elevation works by using the command sudo su. If it

does work, you can move on to making the environment

a bit more secure. One of the first things to do is to

disable the abilities of the root user. Open the

neofthegreatthingsaboutdealingwithstatic

contentisthathavingnoPHPordatabase

dependencies,thismeansthatnotonlyare

thesitesmoreperformant,theyconsumeless

resourcesandthereforearenotonlylessexpensivebut

backinguptheimportantdataistrivial.Therearemany

VPS(VirtualPrivateServer)providersyoucanchoose

forthistask.Forthisinstancewearegoingtouse

DigitalOcean(www.digitalocean.com) astheyarevery

fast,easilyaccessibleandinexpensive.

Thissecondinstalmentbuildsontheprevious

tutorialaroundcreatingperformantstaticwebsites

froma localWordPressinstance.It isassumedatthis

pointthereaderisabletocreateandsuccessfully

exporttheWordPresssiteasa zipfilecontainingthe

staticWorpressexportfilesusingtheSimplyStatic

tool.Thenextstepistocreateaninternetfacing

webserverforthispurpose,whichiswhatwe’regoing

tocoverhere.

Thefirststepistocreateanaccountwith

DigitalOcean, which is pretty simple and straightforward

• you can also use an existing Google account if you
  prefer. Once you’ve signed up, select Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
  as the distribution choice. Select the starting plan and

Simply Static’s

output generation.

Building a secure

website to host sites

Stuart Burnsshows you how to create a secure web server on which you

canhoststatically generated WordPress sites on a secure Apache server.

StuartBurns
specialises in
large-scale
infrastructure
management and
virtualisation
technologies, and
writes about new
and emerging
technologies.

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