How I Deployed WordPress on an Azure VM with Nginx and PHP – With a Custom Welcome Page

#nginx #wordpress #devops #beginners

In this guide, I’ll walk you through how I set up WordPress on an Ubuntu server on Azure using Nginx and added a custom welcome page to make the site more personal.

Architectural Diagram

Below are the steps I Took:

1. Installed Nginx, PHP, and MySQL

I installed the core components needed to serve WordPress:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx php php-mysql mysql-server -y

2. Downloaded and Set Up WordPress

I downloaded WordPress and extracted it into /var/www/html:

wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz
sudo mv wordpress/* /var/www/html/

3. Configured Nginx

I edited the Nginx default configuration to support PHP and WordPress:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

I made sure to set the index directive like this:

index index.html index.htm index.php;

This ensures my custom index.html is shown before WordPress’s index.php

4. Created a Custom Welcome Page

Inside /var/www/html/, I created an index.html file:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Welcome</title>
</head>
<body style="text-align: center; font-family: sans-serif; padding: 50px;">
    <h1>Welcome to Folashade's Core Dev Test!</h1>
    <p>This is a personal test environment where WordPress is installed.</p>
    <a href="/wp-login.php" style="display: inline-block; padding: 10px 20px; background: #0073aa; color: white; text-decoration: none; border-radius: 5px;">Login to WordPress</a>
</body>
</html>