Hi Bayon,

No worries, you can ask as many question as you’d like to, I’ll try to help with everything 🙂
Yes, you can definitely do that via terminal. One thing is that probably it’ll get upgraded along with your PHP version (as you’ll need to reinstall all of the libraries when changing PHP version), but simple ‘sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade’ should do the work as well.

Arek

Thanks for the quick reply Arek,

I asked about the new PHP version because Site Health status keeps showing me that I am running in an older PHP version. Although it’s a recommendation, I thought I should do something about it. Now I understand it’s not that serious.

I have another question (last one :D), I use a plugin called AAWP, in its dashboard, it is showing that the version of PHP cURL (7.58.0) I have is not up to date, and I should do something about it. Can I do that through the terminal?

Bayon

Hi Bayon,

Thanks!
1. It’ll work with Linode and really any other VPS provider. You’re right, operations are the same.
2. Yes, I’ve installed PHP7.2, but would recommend to go with PHP7.4 now, as it’s the latest version available. If you’d go with PHP7.2 it’s also relatively easy to upgrade to higher versions. If you’d have any troubles, contact me and I’ll help 🙂

Arek

Hi Kassandra, thank you for the feedback! I’ve fixed the typo.
Regarding your questions – curl is a library to make data transfers via different protocols, so it’s used e.g. when the WordPress is being updated automatically (it has to download the WordPress archive)
zip – will be necessary to programmatically unzip archives (e.g. plugins) when you upload them
gd – image library used by WordPress for image manipulation
intl – internationalization (so different languages for your website)
mbstring – multi-byte string functions, used to manage non-ascii strings
soap – messaging protocol (something like REST, let’s say)
xml, xmlrpc – XML related libraries, WordPress and some of plugins use them

If you’ve got any other questions, I’m here to help! 🙂

I’m brand new to Digital Ocean and I’m finding this guide very helpful. I’m also following a few other Digital Ocean/LEMP/WordPress guides and I see that they only install `php-fpm php-mysql`.

What are the other extensions `[php-curl php-gd php-intl php-mbstring php-soap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-zip ` you have listed used for? Are they required for WordPress?

Hi Danny!
Yeah, the /var/www/html is the default location for websites on Ubuntu, but they can be anywhere, basically. I usually recommend named directory, like in above article in this section: https://apollin.com/digitalocean-wordpress-setup#installing-wordpress
So, e.g. apollin.com is in /var/www/apollin.com.
Reach out to me at info at apollin.com, I’ll try to help you identify the problem on your server! 🙂

Thanks,
Arek

I noticed there’s a /var/www/html folder and it seems to be the recommended location for website files to load based on DO’s article

Is it possible that the WP files needed to be in there for the website to load?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your comment Jesse! Of course, my bad, I completely forgot about FastCGI, will make sure to update the post and mention you there, thanks a lot for pointing this out!
I’ll definitely check your project (and probably mention it/post about it), it seems very interesting. Once again, thanks and all the best, Jesse!