Setup your first website in under 15 minutes for free!

Introduction

Hello, today I will be showing you how to set up your first website in under 15 minutes completely free.

For this particular tutorial, we will be setting up a website powered by wordpress.

Requirements & Download Links

Github Student Pack

Wordpress files

FileZilla

Putty

Getting Started

Login to your github account.

Navigate to the Student Developer Pack

We will be utilizing both of the DigitalOcean and Namecheap offers.
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Click "Get your code" for DigitalOcean
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Sign up on DigitalOcean and activate the free $50 code provided to you.

Click "New Droplet" under "Create a Droplet" on the projects page.

For this tutorial, we will be using Ubuntu 16.04.6 x64
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After creating your first droplet open putty and enter your server's IP.
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Click open on putty and you will be prompted to a screen "Login as:"

You will receive an email from DigitalOcean with your login information
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Upon logging into the server it may ask for a password change for security purposes, use a lot of random characters and numbers copy&paste into putty by right clicking and hitting enter.

Now that we are successfully into our server we can begin updating it.

Code 
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Press y and hit enter when prompted to update the server.

Now we will be installing lamp on our server.

Code 
apt-get install lamp-server^

Press y and hit enter when prompted to install lamp.

You will soon be prompted to a screen asking for a password for mysql
Spoiler (Click to View)I will be using "mysqlpassword" then hit enter. ( make sure you use a secure password )

We will now begin editing the mysql on our server.

Code 
mysql -u root -p

You will enter the password you just created for mysql mine is "mysqlpassword"

Now that we are in the mysql we will create a database

Code 
CREATE DATABASE Sociopathsdb;

We will also create a user and password for that database

Code 
CREATE USER Sociopathuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'Sociopathpass';

Grant privileges

Code 
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON Sociopathsdb.* TO Sociopathuser@localhost;

flush privileges

Code 
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now finally exit

Code 
exit

Ok now that we have the mysql database setup we can install and unzip wordpress

Code 
cd /tmp

Code 
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip

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apt install unzip

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unzip -q latest.zip -d /var/www/html/

Code 
sudo service apache2 restart

Now we can modify the directories

Code 
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wordpress

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chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/wordpress

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mkdir -p /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/uploads

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chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/uploads

Now that is done, open your web browser and enter your server's IP into the address bar.
Spoiler (Click to View)You can see apache was installed successfully.

Now add /wordpress/ to your server IP to begin the installation.
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You can now select your language, then click "Let's go" on the next page to begin installing wordpress.
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Now we can enter our wordpress database details we made earlier, click submit and run the installation.
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Now we will fill out the information needed to login to wordpress then click "Install wordpress"
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Enter the information you just created to login and we will be taken to the dashboard.
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Navigate to "Appearance" and "Themes" then to "add new" and finally "add theme"
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Browse and upload the files "shapely" I provided Install now and then click "activate"
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Now click "update" and "Get started with Shapely"
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Navigate to Recommended Actions and click Import demo content
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Navigate to "tools" and "import" wordpress "install now" and "run importer"
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Select the XML file I provided and click "upload file and import" then check the box and submit
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Now we navigate to "Plugins" and "Add new" and search for "Widget Importer & Exporter" install and activate it.
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Now navigate to "tools" and "widget importer&exporter" browse and import the WIE file
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You can now navigate to "pages" and "all pages" and customize any of them.
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You can now also navigate to "Settings" and "General" then remove /wordpress/ only from the "Site Address (URL)" and save.
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We now open Filezilla enter our server details and quickconnect, navigate to /var/www/html and delete "index.html"
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Open the wordpress folder and copy the ".htaccess" and "index.php" over to the Sociopaths folder and go back into /var/www/html
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Edit index.php then copy the ".htaccess" and "index.php" back over to /var/www/html
Spoiler (Click to View)( You can now type your servers IP into the browser without /wordpress/ at the end )

Now It's time to connect our domain provided to us for free by namecheap using the student pack
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After receiving your domain go to the DNS settings and point it at the digitalocean server's IP.
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Go back into the wordpress "settings" and "general" and change the server IP into your new domain.
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And... You're done! :) You can now customize it any way you want and have fun.
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Hopefully you guys enjoyed the tutorial, a bit lengthy but I hope it helps you get started with your first website. 🤝