Intro

For a better development experience I needed to set up Wordpress locally on my Tumbleweed machine, which was somewhat different than the Ubuntu that I brought the site from. It wasn’t really 500 steps, but does have some gotchas and require some time to get right.

Prerequisites

• Have a version of the WordPress site running somewhere on server that you can access. You need a mysqldump of its db and a copy of its complete file structure.
  • mysqldump -h host_if_not_local -P 3360 -uwordpressuser -p X > ~/X.sql
    • the port -P is whatever port it as served from, if not local and not default
    • You will be prompted for the password of the user, which is the password from the wp-config of the site
• Have Apache, PHP, and MySQL or MariaDB running locally. You can find these in the repo with sudo zypper search lamp, which will show you the lamp_server pattern that you want. Install that.

Install the site

1. Locate the base place that you are serving locally. Mine defaulted to /srv/www/htdocs/.

2. Source the database into your mysql, replacing X below with the name you want for your database.

   1. cd to the directory with thingyoudumped.sql
   2. log into the local db with sql. I had to be root to log in with the privileges I needed, so I started with sudo -i
   3. create the db and create everything you need to fill, and the priveleges Wordpress will need. CREATE USER 'X'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'X'; CREATE DATABASE X; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON X.* to 'X';
      • Note the @'localhost'. In modern mysql, the old @'*' means everything EXCEPT localhost, so you won’t work with the star.
   4. from the mysql prompt, /use X and then run source thingyoudumped.sql and watch it bring in all the stuff you need

3. Copy your Wordpress directory, which should be the directory containing wp-config.php, into the served place, such as /srv/www/htdocs/.

4. Make sure the following lines are present in your wp-config.php, where X is the name of the actual directory containing the wp-config file:

   define('WP_HOME','http://localhost/X');
   define('WP_SITEURL','http://localhost/X');
   

   Note the absence of / at the end of those http addresses. With a / at the end, I spent a while debugging why I was simply being routed to my base localhost directory and not the Wordpress site.

You will also need to make sure that wp-config contains working database credentials for the db you just created in step 2.3, unless you just copied the same credentials as the site had before.

Making apache happy with .htaccess

In the same folder as your wp-config you should find a .htaccess file for the apache config that WordPress requires to make things work. It should contain something like this. My actual file had a massive section before this for WP-Rocket, but this is what is necessary.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /X/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /X/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

configuring apache itself with default.conf

This was the biggest difference from installing locally on Ubuntu. Apache on Tumbleweed uses a different directory structure. It doesn’t have the sites-enabled or sites-avalailable directories, or the a2ensite family of helpers. Instead, the single location I need was /etc/apache2/default-server.conf, which I needed to adjust to respect the htaccess of our target directory. It had a bunch of other stuff in the file, but the following is the important part for WordPress:

DocumentRoot "/srv/www/htdocs"

<Directory "/srv/www/htdocs">
        Options All
        AllowOverride All
        <IfModule !mod_access_compat.c>
                Require all granted
        </IfModule>
        <IfModule mod_access_compat.c>
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </IfModule>
</Directory>

<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
        UserDir public_html
        Include /etc/apache2/mod_userdir.conf
</IfModule>

IncludeOptional /etc/apache2/conf.d/*.conf

IncludeOptional /etc/apache2/conf.d/apache2-manual?conf
ServerName 127.0.0.1

Success!

After this I was up and running. There might me another step about installing a php accellerator, but I didn’t have to do that on this site. It should be available from the repo if you need it.