HOW TO HOST WORDPRESS ON DIGITALOCEAN – THE COMPLETE GUIDE (PART 4/4)

Setting up your domain name and sending emails from the server

This is the final part in the tutorial series “How to Host WordPress on DigitalOcean – The Complete Guide”. The other parts are as below:

  1. Creating a new Droplet and setting up users
  2. Creating and serving a static website
  3. Setting up MySQL and creating a WordPress website
  4. Setting up your domain name and sending emails from the server

 

Set up your domain name on DigitalOcean

Prepare DigitalOcean to accept the domain

Now we’re off the command line for a little bit, let’s head back on over to your Droplets page at DigitalOcean.

You should see your Droplet listed, on the right hand side of it click More and then Add a domain.

Enter your domain name (testwordpress.com) into the textbox and click Add domain.

That’s it! If you’re interested in more information, look no further.

 

Update your DNS Records

We then need to change our DNS records (for our domain name) to point to our new Droplet.

There are hundreds of tutorials online for this and its not DigitalOcean specific, so it seems crazy to write another. This tutorial is thorough and tells you everything you need to know.

If you know what to do, just go ahead and set the following nameservers:

ns1.digitalocean.com
ns2.digitalocean.com
ns3.digitalocean.com

DNS records can take time to propagate, how long it takes depends on your TTL and your provider, but 24 hours is usually more than ample time for the changeover to complete.

Once this is complete you should delete the record we created in your host file. We no longer need it.

 

Enable the server to send emails

Most websites need the ability to send emails. Some also need to receive so need to host a mailbox – the latter is out of the scope of this tutorial, and you may want to consider this before you do it.

Enabling the server to send emails however is quiet painless with an application called Postfix.

To install and set it up in its most basic and working犀利士
fashion we need to do the following:

First ensure apt-get is up to date:

sudo apt-get update

Then install mailutils, which will launch the wizard to configure it, run the following command and follow its instructions.

sudo apt install mailutils

When the question comes up to set your mail type, select Internet site.

Finally we need to do a little bit more to configure Postfix. Run the following command:

sudo vim /etc/postfix/main.cf

Scroll down until you see a line that says:

inet_interfaces = all

Change it to say:

inet_interfaces = loopback-only

Save the file and you should be good to go! You can test if it works with the following command:

echo "This is the body of the email" | mail -s "This is the subject line" "[email protected]樂威壯
M"

And that should be it! You server should now be able to send emails. If you’d like to understand what is going on, or read more, here is a great start.

 

That’s a wrap

By this point you should have a Droplet that is successfully running WordPress, can be viewed online and can send emails.

I hope this tutorial proves useful to anybody that was looking to set up a Droplet to run WordPress, or any PHP application for that matter. If you have any questions, notice any errors or feel something needs to be elaborated on please feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to update the posts.

 

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