How To Set Up WordPress Multisite with Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04

Following these steps exactly… I’m on step 5 and I’m not able to Choose the Sub-domains option (It says: “Because your install is in a directory, the sites in your WordPress network must use sub-directories.”)

Thanks

Yep it is because its on an IP address, Thank you

I installed the Multisite network with Sub-domain option! I set up a wildcard record according to these steps for my primary domain… But I am not sure what kind of DNS query to do to make sure it is working. Will a WHOIS lookup or PING work? Unfortunately I can’t reach any subsites in my browser (e.g. example.mydomain.com ) I was able to install everything and add a subsite but the pages are not loading

Great Tutorial BTW,

Quick question - How do we increase the Max Upload Size?

Changing the Upload size in Mutlisite Dashboard -> Settings -> Network Settings -> Max upload file size does not work.

I believe there may be a conflict somewhere with another file(s).

Thanks, Joe.

I’ll confess, I did skip the site ID plugin and just refer to the “ID=#” in the address - ended up working great though!

Most excellent tutorial, thanks Jesin!

If my primary site is mysite.com and I want to add 10-20 sites like site.mysite.com, site2.mysite.com and so on… when they are mapped to their original domain like site1.com, site2.com, will be they accessible also in their sub-domain site.mysite.com and how Google will index that sites?

Can this be a solution for a web agency to host and maintain clients sites? or their is another approach?

It is not a good idea to have a $host on the logfile afaik.

I am currently hosting domain1.com with WordPress on my server. All is working well and it functions like a normal website would. I want to host domain2.com on the same server. It will have an entirely different domain name. I don’t want domain2.domain1.com. I have Nginx, MySQL, PHP, and WordPress. I want to have domain2.com be similar in nature to domain1.com. What’s the best way to accomplish this?

Is this really the best method? It doesn’t seem very elegant for something simple like this. If it still is the best route though, could you expand upon those steps? Thanks.

I tried step five with modifying the wp-config.php file and then my website stopped working (shows zero content). I removed the stuff I just put in and it still isn’t working. Not sure what is wrong. Don’t think anything in that file is beyond what I normally have. Also moved the plugins up a directory to see if they were the problem, but that didn’t help.

http://pastebin.com/u1kT7Yam

Hi, great tutorial.

I’m having trouble with my multi-site setup and am looking for help. I’ve followed the steps above but can’t seem to access my multi-sites.

My server setup is as follows:

• domain.com
• wpmu.domain.com
• secondary.domain.com

Each virtual block is running their own instance of Wordpress. The wpmu.domain.com block will be running a multisite. The multisite is configured to run subdirectories, wpmu.domain.com/site1 for example.

The problem is that when I try to access any of the multisites I get a 404 error. I’ve noticed that whenever I attempt to access a multisite the following entry is made in the access log (note the missing url):

IPADDRESS - - [16/Sep/2014:18:29:47 -0400] “GET /site1 HTTP/1.1” 404 208 “-” …

The strange part is when I access wp-admin (wpmu.domain.com/wp-admin), it works, and the following entry is made in the access log:

IPADDRESS - - [16/Sep/2014:18:29:31 -0400] “POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1” 200 59 “http://wpmu.domain.com/wp-admin/network/index.php” …

I’ve copied the nginx “Rewrite rules for Multisites using subdirectories” config from here: http://wiki.nginx.org/WordPress

Is there anything else I’m missing?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks Jesin! I was able to get it working with the following config:

server {
	server_name example.com *.example.com ;

	access_log   /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
	error_log    /var/log/nginx/example.com.error.log;

	root /var/www/example.com/htdocs;
	index index.php;

	if (!-e $request_filename) {
		rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$host$uri/ permanent;	
		rewrite ^(/[^/]+)?(/wp-.*) $2 last;                     
		rewrite ^(/[^/]+)?(/.*\.php) $2 last;                   
	}

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
	}

	location ~ \.php$ {
		try_files $uri /index.php;
		include fastcgi_params;
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
	}

	location ~* ^.+\.(ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|rss|atom|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$ {
		access_log off;	log_not_found off; expires max;
	}

	location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
	location ~ /\. { deny  all; access_log off; log_not_found off; }
}

Hi Jesin,

Do you have any tips on how to make sure sitemaps are working correctly with subdomains? Mine was working before - but something may have happened where some of my sitemaps are pointing to the subdomain and not the correct URL.

Check out an example here: My Sitemap

The sitemaps for iOS points to the subdomain, while the sitemaps for OSX points to the correct URL.

It started about a week ago where the issues came up.

I am using Yoast SEO which comes with an internal sitemap option.

It’s mentioning since I am on NGINX, it’s saying this message here

As you're on NGINX, you'll need the following rewrites:
# PLUGINS : Enable Rewrite Rules for Yoast SEO SiteMap
rewrite ^/sitemap_index\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;

Not too entirely sure if I am putting this in the right place, as I placed that code in this file:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/wp-ms

I don’t think this is a plugin issue, but maybe a setup configuration.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks! Joe.

Ok, it seems to be working alright so far. When I go to secondarydomain.com though, it still get the SSL/TLS certifcate for primarydomain.com, so it gets an error. I already have the certificate for seconarydomain.com. How do I make it so secondarydomain.com gets the correct certifcate? I’m using Nginx. Thanks.

Thank You. Works just perfect.

I can only access the nginx Welcome page.

I deleted default from sites-enabled, added my edited config file to sites-available and symlinked it to sites-enabled, ran the config test and restarted nginx.

Checking the error log shows me:

2014/10/06 15:05:21 [error] 1568#0: *2 rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting to "/index.php", client: ::ffff:198.12.87.151, server: pnwild.net, request: "GET //MyAdmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1", host: "104.131.132.198"

looking at my config file I don’t understand why the redirect issue:

server {
        listen [::]:80 ipv6only=off; 
        server_name pnwild.net *.pnwild.net
        root /usr/share/nginx/sites;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
        }

        location ~ /favicon.ico {
            access_log off;
            log_not_found off;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri /index.php;
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        }

        access_log  /var/log/nginx/$host-access.log;
        error_log   /var/log/nginx/wpms-error.log;
    }

Hi, I have followed this tutorial but wanted to know if this will also work for Wordpress Multisite Subdirectory installation instead of Subdomains?

Is there tutorials for a Subdirectory Multisite type?

Thanks

Hi Jesin, I just saw your tutorial after I created mine. I want to run several wordpress sites in their own directories and have their own domain name.

Currently I cant run phpmyadmin when I access ip_or_weburl/phpmyadmin, it returns me to 404page of wordpress and also I can run ip_or_weburl/info.php

I set each wordpress under /etc/nginx/sites-available/web1 /etc/nginx/sites-available/web2 /etc/nginx/sites-available/web3

Please help by commenting on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/phpmyadmin-404-error-on-nginx-ubuntu-configuration

I tried step five with modifying the wp-config.php file and then my website stopped working (shows zero content). I removed the stuff I just put in and it still isn’t working. Not sure what is wrong. Don’t think anything in that file is beyond what I normally have. Also moved the plugins up a directory to see if they were the problem, but that didn’t help.

http://pastebin.com/u1kT7Yam

Hi, great tutorial.

I’m having trouble with my multi-site setup and am looking for help. I’ve followed the steps above but can’t seem to access my multi-sites.

My server setup is as follows:

• domain.com
• wpmu.domain.com
• secondary.domain.com

Each virtual block is running their own instance of Wordpress. The wpmu.domain.com block will be running a multisite. The multisite is configured to run subdirectories, wpmu.domain.com/site1 for example.

The problem is that when I try to access any of the multisites I get a 404 error. I’ve noticed that whenever I attempt to access a multisite the following entry is made in the access log (note the missing url):

IPADDRESS - - [16/Sep/2014:18:29:47 -0400] “GET /site1 HTTP/1.1” 404 208 “-” …

The strange part is when I access wp-admin (wpmu.domain.com/wp-admin), it works, and the following entry is made in the access log:

IPADDRESS - - [16/Sep/2014:18:29:31 -0400] “POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1” 200 59 “http://wpmu.domain.com/wp-admin/network/index.php” …

I’ve copied the nginx “Rewrite rules for Multisites using subdirectories” config from here: http://wiki.nginx.org/WordPress

Is there anything else I’m missing?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks Jesin! I was able to get it working with the following config:

server {
	server_name example.com *.example.com ;

	access_log   /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
	error_log    /var/log/nginx/example.com.error.log;

	root /var/www/example.com/htdocs;
	index index.php;

	if (!-e $request_filename) {
		rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$host$uri/ permanent;	
		rewrite ^(/[^/]+)?(/wp-.*) $2 last;                     
		rewrite ^(/[^/]+)?(/.*\.php) $2 last;                   
	}

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
	}

	location ~ \.php$ {
		try_files $uri /index.php;
		include fastcgi_params;
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
	}

	location ~* ^.+\.(ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|rss|atom|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$ {
		access_log off;	log_not_found off; expires max;
	}

	location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
	location ~ /\. { deny  all; access_log off; log_not_found off; }
}

Hi Jesin,

Do you have any tips on how to make sure sitemaps are working correctly with subdomains? Mine was working before - but something may have happened where some of my sitemaps are pointing to the subdomain and not the correct URL.

Check out an example here: My Sitemap

The sitemaps for iOS points to the subdomain, while the sitemaps for OSX points to the correct URL.

It started about a week ago where the issues came up.

I am using Yoast SEO which comes with an internal sitemap option.

It’s mentioning since I am on NGINX, it’s saying this message here

As you're on NGINX, you'll need the following rewrites:
# PLUGINS : Enable Rewrite Rules for Yoast SEO SiteMap
rewrite ^/sitemap_index\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;

Not too entirely sure if I am putting this in the right place, as I placed that code in this file:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/wp-ms

I don’t think this is a plugin issue, but maybe a setup configuration.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks! Joe.

Ok, it seems to be working alright so far. When I go to secondarydomain.com though, it still get the SSL/TLS certifcate for primarydomain.com, so it gets an error. I already have the certificate for seconarydomain.com. How do I make it so secondarydomain.com gets the correct certifcate? I’m using Nginx. Thanks.

Thank You. Works just perfect.

I can only access the nginx Welcome page.

I deleted default from sites-enabled, added my edited config file to sites-available and symlinked it to sites-enabled, ran the config test and restarted nginx.

Checking the error log shows me:

2014/10/06 15:05:21 [error] 1568#0: *2 rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting to "/index.php", client: ::ffff:198.12.87.151, server: pnwild.net, request: "GET //MyAdmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1", host: "104.131.132.198"

looking at my config file I don’t understand why the redirect issue:

server {
        listen [::]:80 ipv6only=off; 
        server_name pnwild.net *.pnwild.net
        root /usr/share/nginx/sites;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
        }

        location ~ /favicon.ico {
            access_log off;
            log_not_found off;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri /index.php;
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        }

        access_log  /var/log/nginx/$host-access.log;
        error_log   /var/log/nginx/wpms-error.log;
    }

Hi, I have followed this tutorial but wanted to know if this will also work for Wordpress Multisite Subdirectory installation instead of Subdomains?

Is there tutorials for a Subdirectory Multisite type?

Thanks

Hi Jesin, I just saw your tutorial after I created mine. I want to run several wordpress sites in their own directories and have their own domain name.

Currently I cant run phpmyadmin when I access ip_or_weburl/phpmyadmin, it returns me to 404page of wordpress and also I can run ip_or_weburl/info.php

I set each wordpress under /etc/nginx/sites-available/web1 /etc/nginx/sites-available/web2 /etc/nginx/sites-available/web3

Please help by commenting on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/phpmyadmin-404-error-on-nginx-ubuntu-configuration

I tried step five with modifying the wp-config.php file and then my website stopped working (shows zero content). I removed the stuff I just put in and it still isn’t working. Not sure what is wrong. Don’t think anything in that file is beyond what I normally have. Also moved the plugins up a directory to see if they were the problem, but that didn’t help.

http://pastebin.com/u1kT7Yam

Hi, great tutorial.

I’m having trouble with my multi-site setup and am looking for help. I’ve followed the steps above but can’t seem to access my multi-sites.

My server setup is as follows:

• domain.com
• wpmu.domain.com
• secondary.domain.com

Each virtual block is running their own instance of Wordpress. The wpmu.domain.com block will be running a multisite. The multisite is configured to run subdirectories, wpmu.domain.com/site1 for example.

The problem is that when I try to access any of the multisites I get a 404 error. I’ve noticed that whenever I attempt to access a multisite the following entry is made in the access log (note the missing url):

IPADDRESS - - [16/Sep/2014:18:29:47 -0400] “GET /site1 HTTP/1.1” 404 208 “-” …

The strange part is when I access wp-admin (wpmu.domain.com/wp-admin), it works, and the following entry is made in the access log:

IPADDRESS - - [16/Sep/2014:18:29:31 -0400] “POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1” 200 59 “http://wpmu.domain.com/wp-admin/network/index.php” …

I’ve copied the nginx “Rewrite rules for Multisites using subdirectories” config from here: http://wiki.nginx.org/WordPress

Is there anything else I’m missing?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks Jesin! I was able to get it working with the following config:

server {
	server_name example.com *.example.com ;

	access_log   /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
	error_log    /var/log/nginx/example.com.error.log;

	root /var/www/example.com/htdocs;
	index index.php;

	if (!-e $request_filename) {
		rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$host$uri/ permanent;	
		rewrite ^(/[^/]+)?(/wp-.*) $2 last;                     
		rewrite ^(/[^/]+)?(/.*\.php) $2 last;                   
	}

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
	}

	location ~ \.php$ {
		try_files $uri /index.php;
		include fastcgi_params;
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
	}

	location ~* ^.+\.(ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|rss|atom|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$ {
		access_log off;	log_not_found off; expires max;
	}

	location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
	location ~ /\. { deny  all; access_log off; log_not_found off; }
}

Hi Jesin,

Do you have any tips on how to make sure sitemaps are working correctly with subdomains? Mine was working before - but something may have happened where some of my sitemaps are pointing to the subdomain and not the correct URL.

Check out an example here: My Sitemap

The sitemaps for iOS points to the subdomain, while the sitemaps for OSX points to the correct URL.

It started about a week ago where the issues came up.

I am using Yoast SEO which comes with an internal sitemap option.

It’s mentioning since I am on NGINX, it’s saying this message here

As you're on NGINX, you'll need the following rewrites:
# PLUGINS : Enable Rewrite Rules for Yoast SEO SiteMap
rewrite ^/sitemap_index\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;

Not too entirely sure if I am putting this in the right place, as I placed that code in this file:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/wp-ms

I don’t think this is a plugin issue, but maybe a setup configuration.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks! Joe.

Ok, it seems to be working alright so far. When I go to secondarydomain.com though, it still get the SSL/TLS certifcate for primarydomain.com, so it gets an error. I already have the certificate for seconarydomain.com. How do I make it so secondarydomain.com gets the correct certifcate? I’m using Nginx. Thanks.

Thank You. Works just perfect.

I can only access the nginx Welcome page.

I deleted default from sites-enabled, added my edited config file to sites-available and symlinked it to sites-enabled, ran the config test and restarted nginx.

Checking the error log shows me:

2014/10/06 15:05:21 [error] 1568#0: *2 rewrite or internal redirection cycle while internally redirecting to "/index.php", client: ::ffff:198.12.87.151, server: pnwild.net, request: "GET //MyAdmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1", host: "104.131.132.198"

looking at my config file I don’t understand why the redirect issue:

server {
        listen [::]:80 ipv6only=off; 
        server_name pnwild.net *.pnwild.net
        root /usr/share/nginx/sites;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
        }

        location ~ /favicon.ico {
            access_log off;
            log_not_found off;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri /index.php;
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        }

        access_log  /var/log/nginx/$host-access.log;
        error_log   /var/log/nginx/wpms-error.log;
    }

Hi, I have followed this tutorial but wanted to know if this will also work for Wordpress Multisite Subdirectory installation instead of Subdomains?

Is there tutorials for a Subdirectory Multisite type?

Thanks

Hi Jesin, I just saw your tutorial after I created mine. I want to run several wordpress sites in their own directories and have their own domain name.

Currently I cant run phpmyadmin when I access ip_or_weburl/phpmyadmin, it returns me to 404page of wordpress and also I can run ip_or_weburl/info.php

I set each wordpress under /etc/nginx/sites-available/web1 /etc/nginx/sites-available/web2 /etc/nginx/sites-available/web3

Please help by commenting on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/phpmyadmin-404-error-on-nginx-ubuntu-configuration

Hi, Great tutorial I have followed all and works fine but at this point I have an issue to connect using Winscp because my user don’t have write permissions. By the way I’ve found a tutorial to solve this but in it mention that it is not recommended install wordpress in /usr/share/nginx/wordpress instead it recommends create a dir on /var for instance /var/www.

I appreciate your comments.

Source: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/clarification-please-write-permissions-usr-share-nginx-www

Thanks

This does not seem to be working for me. I followed a tutorial on here about load balancing wordpress. I am guessing it does not work because of that. Any ideas?

Thanks you so much for the awesome write-up! Really helpful!

I followed it to the letter and it works perfect, so all good there! However I am running into an issue when using PHPMyAdmin. I’m really not comfortable doing mysql work without some kind of graphical interface, but I run into the same issue as reported by another user in October 2014 (all links to phpmyadmin end up in 404’s.

What can be done to solve this?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers, Piet

Thank you for the great tutorial. I followed your tutorial and managed to install WP multisite quite quickly.

However; when I would like to restore a site using a wpmu plugin ‘snapshots’, and I got an error message as follow:

Abort class-pclzip.php : Missing zlib extensions

I read lots of forums and they suggested to recompile php with option zlib. Could you please help me on this?

Thank you for your help. cheers,

Thanks for the comprehensive tutorial, i got it working!

Next i’d want to use a cache plugin like fastcash or w3 tc to work with this install, i seem to not get it right when updating nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/wp-ms

Thanx for this great tuto: in combination with some other tutos ive managed to get a wpms up and running its great because before 2015 i have had no server software experience at all!

For now i have a question: I want to set nginx up for wp rocket(caching) i have found a script that i should add to the nginx config file before any location block:

set $cache_uri $request_uri;

# POST requests and urls with a query string should always go to PHP
if ($request_method = POST) {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}
if ($query_string != "") {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}

# Don't cache uris containing the following segments
if ($request_uri ~* "(/wp-admin/|/xmlrpc.php|/wp-(app|cron|login|register|mail).php|wp-.*.php|/feed/|index.php|wp-comments-popup.php|wp-links-opml.php|wp-locations.php|sitemap(_index)?.xml|[a-z0-9_-]+-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml)") {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}

# Don't use the cache for logged in users or recent commenters
if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author|wordpress_[a-f0-9]+|wp-postpass|wordpress_logged_in") {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}

location / {  
      try_files /wp-content/cache/wp-rocket/$http_host/$cache_uri/index.html $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

As i have followed your tutorial earlier i have in /etc/nginx

nginx.conf

/sites-available/default /sites-available/wp-ms /sites-enabled/wp-ms (the symlink)

so ive pasted the code alternatively in each of the three location, after which ngingx wont restart it “fails” after removing the code: nginx will restart. Could this because its a multisite set-up and that would require a different approach??

Where should i put the code, or what should i do/change to make this work? Thanx for any advice!

Hi Jesin, Hope you can help me, when I’m trying to upload a theme about 3,2MB to my server I’m getting this error:

413 Request Entity Too Large nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

Any suggestion to solve this issue.

Thanks.

Hey Jesin. Got it al running thanks to your tutorial and you’ve helped me out with integrating wp rocket cache into ngingx. Thanks a lot!

Somehow i just broke my nginx, i wanted to update/upgrade but first make a snapshot. I powered off the droplet in my terminal with “poweroff” (instead of shutting it down) that somehow corrupted my set up (i didnt notice yet) i made the snapshot and now the server seems active i did a get update and get upgrade but nginx configtest returns fail, restart ngingx also returned fail. My websites are offline, the same if i revert to the snapshot.

Is there a way to fix nginx? If not: Is there a way to still back-up my wp multisite (the server is accesible through sftp and ssh)

any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Jesin, A little off topic: How can i inspect my database, to clean it up if needed. i am used to PHP my admin Where i can easilly perform tasks like removing obsolete tables. Could you advise on msql maintainance.

thnx

I got a problem in installing plugins which are default in my theme and have an option to install automatically with a button “Begin installing plugins”. But when I click this button its showing “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” what should I do. My plugins menu is disappeared in single site dashboard but its work in “network admin dashboard”

Hi, Great tutorial I have followed all and works fine but at this point I have an issue to connect using Winscp because my user don’t have write permissions. By the way I’ve found a tutorial to solve this but in it mention that it is not recommended install wordpress in /usr/share/nginx/wordpress instead it recommends create a dir on /var for instance /var/www.

I appreciate your comments.

Source: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/clarification-please-write-permissions-usr-share-nginx-www

Thanks

This does not seem to be working for me. I followed a tutorial on here about load balancing wordpress. I am guessing it does not work because of that. Any ideas?

Thanks you so much for the awesome write-up! Really helpful!

I followed it to the letter and it works perfect, so all good there! However I am running into an issue when using PHPMyAdmin. I’m really not comfortable doing mysql work without some kind of graphical interface, but I run into the same issue as reported by another user in October 2014 (all links to phpmyadmin end up in 404’s.

What can be done to solve this?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers, Piet

Thank you for the great tutorial. I followed your tutorial and managed to install WP multisite quite quickly.

However; when I would like to restore a site using a wpmu plugin ‘snapshots’, and I got an error message as follow:

Abort class-pclzip.php : Missing zlib extensions

I read lots of forums and they suggested to recompile php with option zlib. Could you please help me on this?

Thank you for your help. cheers,

Thanks for the comprehensive tutorial, i got it working!

Next i’d want to use a cache plugin like fastcash or w3 tc to work with this install, i seem to not get it right when updating nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/wp-ms

Thanx for this great tuto: in combination with some other tutos ive managed to get a wpms up and running its great because before 2015 i have had no server software experience at all!

For now i have a question: I want to set nginx up for wp rocket(caching) i have found a script that i should add to the nginx config file before any location block:

set $cache_uri $request_uri;

# POST requests and urls with a query string should always go to PHP
if ($request_method = POST) {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}
if ($query_string != "") {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}

# Don't cache uris containing the following segments
if ($request_uri ~* "(/wp-admin/|/xmlrpc.php|/wp-(app|cron|login|register|mail).php|wp-.*.php|/feed/|index.php|wp-comments-popup.php|wp-links-opml.php|wp-locations.php|sitemap(_index)?.xml|[a-z0-9_-]+-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml)") {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}

# Don't use the cache for logged in users or recent commenters
if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author|wordpress_[a-f0-9]+|wp-postpass|wordpress_logged_in") {
  set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}

location / {  
      try_files /wp-content/cache/wp-rocket/$http_host/$cache_uri/index.html $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

As i have followed your tutorial earlier i have in /etc/nginx

nginx.conf

/sites-available/default /sites-available/wp-ms /sites-enabled/wp-ms (the symlink)

so ive pasted the code alternatively in each of the three location, after which ngingx wont restart it “fails” after removing the code: nginx will restart. Could this because its a multisite set-up and that would require a different approach??

Where should i put the code, or what should i do/change to make this work? Thanx for any advice!

Hi Jesin, Hope you can help me, when I’m trying to upload a theme about 3,2MB to my server I’m getting this error:

413 Request Entity Too Large nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

Any suggestion to solve this issue.

Thanks.

Hey Jesin. Got it al running thanks to your tutorial and you’ve helped me out with integrating wp rocket cache into ngingx. Thanks a lot!

Somehow i just broke my nginx, i wanted to update/upgrade but first make a snapshot. I powered off the droplet in my terminal with “poweroff” (instead of shutting it down) that somehow corrupted my set up (i didnt notice yet) i made the snapshot and now the server seems active i did a get update and get upgrade but nginx configtest returns fail, restart ngingx also returned fail. My websites are offline, the same if i revert to the snapshot.

Is there a way to fix nginx? If not: Is there a way to still back-up my wp multisite (the server is accesible through sftp and ssh)

any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Jesin, A little off topic: How can i inspect my database, to clean it up if needed. i am used to PHP my admin Where i can easilly perform tasks like removing obsolete tables. Could you advise on msql maintainance.

thnx

I got a problem in installing plugins which are default in my theme and have an option to install automatically with a button “Begin installing plugins”. But when I click this button its showing “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” what should I do. My plugins menu is disappeared in single site dashboard but its work in “network admin dashboard”

Hi Jesin,

Awesome tutorial, I got my MU + SubDirectory working but I have mapped domains and when I map a domain, it just gives me the 404 Error, is there any tutorials how to do this?

As in do I need to ad the new mapped domain in the DNS? What records do I use?

What do I need to ad in the nginx config file etc? What do I ad into my domains settings on another host to point it. etc.

Thank You in advanced.

I’m a beginner, could you explain me how to fix on step 5 please? I’m not able to choose the Sub-domain. I see ur previous comment but i don’t know how to troubleshoot

"WordPress install is in a directory (not in document root). “WordPress address (URL)” is localhost. “WordPress address (URL)” is IP address such as 127.0.0.1.

Perfect! Is there a way (a tutorial perhaps) on how to achieve ssl certification for multiple domain mapped subdomain sites of a wpms nginx install? I have like: site1.mydomain.com site2.mydomain.com etc and with a domain mapping plugin i map unique domain names to those sites: site1.com mapped to site1.mydomain.com etc

thnx for any thoughts on this matter!

Unfortunately you get a blank page if following this using Debian 8 (Jessie), need the extra fastCGI params I think (well seemed to work so far dropping the following extra’s in the php location block of wp-ms file):

    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include fastcgi_params;

EDIT: So I thought, unfortunately full URL parameters are not carried by fastCGI it seems, not sure what I’m missing…

I followed tutorial step by step, until, install php!

I am facing blank page when, on this step;

Access the primary domain in your browser to begin the WordPress installation. http://examplewp.com/ #

But i can open http://www.mywpsite.com/readme.html

Can you please help me?

Thanks fot the article. How do you deal with domain mapping and different SSL certificates?

You no longer need the wpms_blogid.php plugin, the ID column is shown by default :)

I am using Nginx Virtual host… one My wordpress site post are not open… Wordpress homepage, pages, category pages, wp-admin work fine,… but Only site post are not working… What I do plz reply

Sorry for my bad English , my native language is Spanish.

I have a doubt. Although the tutorial works pretty well for me, I wonder how to get all my domains start with www.

www.example.com

How should your DNS settings in the control panel of Digital Ocean? And how must be setup in the domain mapping?

Thank you

This line said it all to me , thanks for the article

define( ‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true );

I’m stack at the end of step 2. I’m running the command service nginx configtest and i receive * Testing nginx configuration [fail]

I was trying to find the error_log, but everytime I try to access nginx different directories, to locate the error log, I receive a permissions denied.

Anyone can help me regarding that? Thank you.

If we externally host our DNS server, do we still need to point the NS records to digitalocean’s nameservers?

Thanks

Is it possible to do something like?

server_name   * ;

I don’t want to have to manually add each site like this:

server_name examplewp.com *.examplewp.com shoppingsite.com companysite.org;

As there may be hundreds of sites on a multisite.

Any input is much appreciated!!

@jesin first of all thank you for this nice tutorial.

i created wp-multisite using this tutorial on sub-directory and its everything working perfectly. but maybe i done something wrong. when i try to change tagline or permalink of my site 2 & 3 it dont allow me. secondly, from the main site, example.com/wp-admin i cant find domain menu under tools but from 2nd & 3rd site i can find them. is it normal? lastly is there any way to disable network menu from the 3rd site? so that from that sites wp-admin only can manage that sites settings.

thanks in advance.

Hello people,

My site is in DO in nginx, and using Cloudflare’s CDN services. I recently activated Rede Multisite Wordpress, I created a CNAME educacao.proddigital.com.br registry in Cloudflare, and in my administrative panel of the WP network, I created a new site, educacao.proddigital.com.br, but it is not accessible, and the Admin panel returns me error 404, educacao.proddigital.com.br/wp-login.php.

Upon activation of the multisite network, WP asks to include two codes in wp-config.php and .htaccess. But my site is in nginx and does not have .htaccess, so just enter the code in wp-config.php. But the new site is not accessible.

After I activated the “All In One WP Security” plugin, it automatically created an .htaccess file. From there, do I have to use it to insert the code that the WP asks to insert?

Thank you and I await. Rodrigo

Please can you do the same post on how to do this on ubuntu 16.04 please. Thanks

I couldn’t get this to work until I added the following to the server block, to add a trailing slash. rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$host$uri/ permanent;

So the beginning of my server block now looks like this:

server { listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=off; server_name example.com *.example.com;

root /usr/share/nginx/wordpress;
index index.php index.html index.htm;

rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$host$uri/ permanent;