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SlickStack: Free WordPress LEMP Install Script
Howdy friends,
If you're looking for a super easy way to install WordPress cloud servers, SlickStack might be for you. It should work on pretty much any of the KVM clouds promoted on LEB/LET.
SlickStack is a 100% Bash project that will install these modules:
- WordPress (we will experiment with other PHP-based CMS in the future)
- Ubuntu (Debian and Raspbian planned)
- Nginx (including FastCGI Cache, security headers, TCP-only, etc... can be customized)
- Let's Encrypt SSL (OpenSSL is the default, however)
- MySQL (WordPress uses TCP, root/sudo uses auth_socket)
- PHP-FPM (new OPcache features coming soon)
- Redis (used for object caching only)
- Adminer bundled (phpMyAdmin alternative)
- ClamAV malware scanning
- Postfix (coming soon)
- UFW Firewall (supports IPv4 and IPv6)
We encourage and assume the use of CloudFlare DNS, which is why OpenSSL is the default for Nginx to make SSL management a lot simpler, however Let's Encrypt is easily activated.
Several optional MU (Must Use) plugins by LittleBizzy are included by default, such as:
- Autoloader
- Clear Caches
- CloudFlare
- Custom Functions
- Dashboard Cleanup
- Delete Expired Transients
- Disable Attachment Pages
- Disable Embeds
- Disable Emojis
- Disable Empty Trash
- Disable Gutenberg
- Disable Image Compression
- Disable Post Via Email
- Disable XML-RPC
- Error Log Monitor (not by LittleBizzy)
- Force HTTPS
- Force Strong Hashing
- Header Cleanup
- Limit Heartbeat
- Maintenance Mode
- Minify HTML
- Plugin Blacklist
- Server Status (WP Admin Dashboard widget)
- SFTP Details (WP Admin Dashboard widget)
- Virtual Robots.txt
The benefit to the LittleBizzy plugins is that most of them have no MySQL queries, instead all functions are hardcoded and can be modified using PHP defined constants.
SlickStack can be easily customized using the options in /var/www/ss-config
and is highly optimized out-of-the-box for technical SEO either for your own projects, or those of your various clients. In the case of clients, you can provide them only with the SFTP login (not SSH/sudo login) for security reasons. You can also blacklist any WordPress plugins you don't want your clients to be installing.
The entire code is open source on GitHub, you can fork it and rename if you prefer!
We welcome and desire any bug reports or feature requests on GitHub, or good-faith feedback in our community channels, which are linked on our homepage...
Thanks for your support ~
Comments
Hey jess nice to see you around here
Good to see you on LET. Had tried out slickstack. Though not my cup of tea, liked the ease of install and configuration.
Best wishes...
Thanks, mate... if you have specifics on what you didn't like about it (and the type of DevOps tools you prefer and why) that would be really helpful to know if you have a minute!
We are definitely aiming toward web developers who are more frontend-focused, but who feel comfortable poking around Linux shell occasionally.
Hi Jessuppi,
Simply a matter of personal preference mate, no other reasons. I prefer webinoly.
For our main sites use Gridpane, for experimental/ hobby sites there are a few options to play around with, Happy to take another look at slickstack after some time period.
Hei, when will SlickStack support multisite?
Also using Webinoly but will give SlickStack a go, thank you.
Intersting, I use WordOps and Centminmod - quite pleased with both, how does this compare to any or even both of them? @jessuppi
Great question, the functionality technically exists already but not yet "supported"... still more testing needing to be done to ensure it's okay, but should be soon!
https://github.com/littlebizzy/slickstack/blob/master/ss-config-sample.txt
WP_MULTISITE="true"
I've always tried to be supportive of other FOSS software, and I've suggested some of these other options in various venues in the past. Plus, features change over time, so sometimes the best way to compare DevOps tools is to understand their goals and target audience.
That said, a few of the major differences would be:
sudo bash
commands (no need to learn shortcut commands)*For example, you can run standard commands like
sudo apt update && upgrade
in SlickStack without issues, but I believe this is not possible on some other stacks.Really, the MU plugins are one of our biggest features, since LittleBizzy is the maintainer of both SlickStack and said plugins, so we can ensure compatibility.
Thanks for the question, and shout out to all the FOSS dudes donating thousands of hours to these projects!
Actually what I mean to ask is separate wordpress installation, so multiple wordpress installation with multiple database.
Awesome, might give it a go on a small project I'm building based on WordPress. Thanks for the details @jessuppi
Congratulations on your good work. Seems o be a good alternative for Centmin for users who only need WP on their VPS.
Probably never, since the goal of SlickStack is to be extremely simple and predictable. With only one domain per server, resources are more easily optimized and monitored, for example. Security is also vastly improved, and you have a lot more flexibility when configuring the OS and filesystem, etc.
We think that as cloud servers continue to get cheaper and more regional, solutions like SlickStack will become more and more common. For example, if you're a web designer and your client is a plastic surgeon in Miami, you could immediately improve the majority of technical SEO and speed issues by deploying a SlickStack cloud server on a Miami cloud network for them in less than 5 minutes, and easily earn hundreds of dollars (or more) based on the achieved results.
Unless you are going to maintain complex (and expensive) systems like server clusters, load balancing, or high-resource shared/dedicated servers, then spinning up a local cloud VM makes more and more sense these days. So we are hoping that more small-time agencies and developers begin to appreciate and embrace this approach, otherwise we never evolve past the overloaded shared cPanel/Apache server setup of the past few decades.
That being said, this is probably the #1 question we receive, so I'm definitely aware of interest!
@jessuppi, would be interesting to hear your opinion. They rolled out this yesterday:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-automatic-platform-optimization-for-wordpress-using-cloudflare-workers/
The CloudFlare edge workers for WordPress is a very interesting new feature. However, I believe it will only be appropriate for niche enterprise cases, at least for a while.
Because the nature of WordPress is so dynamic, esp. with all the bloated plugins these days that overload typical WP sites with hundreds of SQL queries and such, adding further edge caching to WordPress-based sites would only create more conflicts and complexity in most cases. Plus, most websites have to deal with a variety of freelancers, developers, services, analytics (etc), who would be unaware of and unable to work with advanced edge cache settings like these...
However if you have e.g. an inhouse corporate team that has control over your frontend developers, designers, backend stuff, and everything in between, you could more easily create a workflow and configuration that leverages CloudFlare Workers. The irony of course is that these very organized teams would have less reason to need fancy edge caching because their infrastructure is probably much more robust anyways.
That said, if the Workers can be leveraged on a plugin-level basis (a theoretical example only), that might be much more realistic. Then again, the problem in the WordPress ecosystem these days is that everyone is aiming for market share which means "supporting" every other service out there, so nobody ever seems to want to step on others' toes after they achieve significant name recognition.
(Note: this is not the approach that SlickStack aims to take... we are fine with cutting out certain items from the stack, like cache plugins, when clearly server-level caching like Nginx is more robust.)
Anyway as the blog post itself mentions, the "cache all" feature in CloudFlare is a cheap substitute for these new Workers, but almost nobody is using that either for the same reasons.
Ultimately, CloudFlare is light years ahead of the competition, which is why we encourage using it for DNS management, however I hope that SlickStack continues to value things like free speech and website portability just as much as security and performance, which means not getting overly obsessed or dependent on a given feature or service provider!
If that's the case, you should create a docker image.
Thank you for sharing your in-depth view. I think we can just carry on and live without this new CF's feature.
I appreciate your feedback, however can you explain in more detail why you think Docker would make more sense or generate more interest in SlickStack?
And, what drawbacks to using Docker do you think are relevant here?
Probably to be able to host multiple websites in the same server.
You talking about cloud server, docker is one of those cloud software. Imagine if you have dedicated server and only be able to host 1 website.
You insisted 1 stack for 1 website, the docker image is built around that, 1 docker yaml for 1 website.
The drawback, for the user ? nothing. For you , perhaps additional time to maintain the docker image ?
I create one of them
Installation is simple, via PHP composer
Check for more info here https://github.com/joglomedia/easydock-linux
Hey everyone, here is an update:
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/183972/update-on-slickstack-project-and-thanks-to-let
Also to follow up on the Docker discussion, we decided not to pursue that for now because most of our userbase likes the simple approach... it's also easier to maintain.
SlickStack also supports WP Multisite a lot better now, check it out