I’m writing this about a week after the event, so it might not be entirely accurate, but needless to say it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d expected when I first had the idea!
As mentioned previously, the FreeNAS jail I was using to host WordPress previously was also running various other services and I wanted to create something specifically for WordPress. I also wanted to upgrade PHP from 5.6.x to 7.0.x along with updating to the latest versions of Nginx and MySQL (or actually MariaDB). I’d given some thought to migrating everything across, but as they’d been developed using the standard WordPress themes, and I’d just bought my first premium theme, I thought it would be more interesting to migrate the content and then recreate using the new theme.
Actually creating the FEMP jail was pretty straight forward, and the only mistake I made was not creating a snapshot once I’d got the basic setup. My web jail had a mount point to the dataset for the database files (called fempdb) and I foolishly cloned this to create a new dataset for my WordPress jail (wordpressdb). This just created unnecessary problems trying to install MariaDB and then connect the WordPress install, so after a few failed attempts I decided to destroy the jail and wordpressdb dataset and start from scratch. This time, after setting up the jail with the FEMP stack and installing WordPress, I took a snapshot, so if anything went wrong I could roll back to the default platform. This has to be one of my favourite features of FreeNAS, or more specifically the file system ZFS, although unless you remember to snapshot it’s not much use.
Anyway, with the snapshot taken and a mount point to a blank wordpressdb dataset, installing and configuring a database was straightforward and connecting to the IP address brought up the WordPress easy setup screens, where it was just a case of pointing things to the databases and waiting a few minutes. It seems much faster, although I suspect some of that is down to no plugins running as much as the speed PHP7 brings over 5.6.
Over the last week, I’ve rebuilt this blog and my company web page in the WordPress jail, and my knowledge of WordPress has certainly improved since I did this the first time. I’m still getting to grips with the Divi theme, although that looks really powerful and simple to use too for someone with limited HTML and CSS knowledge. Maybe that’s something for my next Udemy adventure.
I might come back to this at some point and documents setting up the FEMP stack, installing WordPress and configuring the database, but for the time being everything I wanted is moved to the new jail, and I now have another WordPress environment for playing around in.
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