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SlickStack: Free WordPress LEMP Install Script
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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

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • 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...

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • @vyas11 said:
    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.

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • Hei, when will SlickStack support multisite?

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • Also using Webinoly but will give SlickStack a go, thank you.

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • jahrincjahrinc Member
    edited October 2020

    Intersting, I use WordOps and Centminmod - quite pleased with both, how does this compare to any or even both of them? @jessuppi

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • jessuppijessuppi Member
    edited October 2020

    @chocolateshirt said:
    Hei, when will SlickStack support multisite?

    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"

    @jahrinc said:
    Intersting, I use WordOps and Centminmod - quite pleased with both, how does this compare to any or even both of them? @jessuppi

    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:

    • SlickStack has no dependencies and is 100% Bash-scripting only*
    • SlickStack supports Ubuntu/Debian (not CentOS)
    • SlickStack supports sudo bash commands (no need to learn shortcut commands)
    • SlickStack strongly recommends and tests our stack with CloudFlare DNS
    • SlickStack bundles free MU (Must Use) plugins for WordPress
    • SlickStack aims for the "decisions, not options" mantra and keeping things as simple and stable as possible while evangelizing best practices... ultimately, we do not aim to support every single other plugin and service in the WordPress ecosystem just to get "backlinks"... for example, unlike other tools, we do not support WP cache plugins

    *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!

    Thanked by 1chocolateshirt
  • 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

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • XiNiXXiNiX Member, Host Rep

    @jessuppi said:
    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 ~

    Congratulations on your good work. Seems o be a good alternative for Centmin for users who only need WP on their VPS.

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • jessuppijessuppi Member
    edited October 2020

    @chocolateshirt said:
    Actually what I mean to ask is separate wordpress installation, so multiple wordpress installation with multiple database.

    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!

    Thanked by 1chocolateshirt
  • @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/

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • jessuppijessuppi Member
    edited October 2020

    @ernie88 said:
    @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!

    Thanked by 1ernie88
  • @jessuppi said:

    @chocolateshirt said:
    Actually what I mean to ask is separate wordpress installation, so multiple wordpress installation with multiple database.

    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!

    If that's the case, you should create a docker image.

  • @jessuppi said:

    @ernie88 said:
    @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!

    Thank you for sharing your in-depth view. I think we can just carry on and live without this new CF's feature.

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • @yokowasis said:

    If that's the case, you should create a docker image.

    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?

  • @jessuppi said:

    @yokowasis said:

    If that's the case, you should create a docker image.

    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.

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • yokowasisyokowasis Member
    edited October 2020

    @jessuppi said:

    @yokowasis said:

    If that's the case, you should create a docker image.

    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?

    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 ?

    Thanked by 1jessuppi
  • masedimasedi Member

    @yokowasis said:

    @jessuppi said:

    @chocolateshirt said:
    Actually what I mean to ask is separate wordpress installation, so multiple wordpress installation with multiple database.

    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!

    If that's the case, you should create a docker image.

    I create one of them

    Installation is simple, via PHP composer

    composer global require joglomedia/easydock-linux
    

    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 :)

    Thanked by 1JasonM
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