How opinionated is the WordPress install?

[alec]

Hi, new user to Hestia and really enjoying it so far!

I run a few WordPress instances on (Bitnami) EC2 images. The sites are small/low traffic, but customers can login etc. so I’m looking to change the stack to improve performance for logged in users by switching to NGINX, enable Object Caching etc.

I’m trying out Oracle Cloud Free Tier Ubuntu instances, even with 1GB RAM they seem ample.

I first tried EasyEngine to setup WordPress. While the stack looks attractive I see there’s little on the admin/monitoring side of things. Also the fact it’s Docker-based is a confusion/turn off for me.

I then tried WordOps. This has a similarly optimised WordPress stack, no Docker and nice monitoring features (demo). But issues with SSL and other pain points caused me to keep looking.

I then found Hestia (via this great video) which seemed the most painless option. Cloudflare SSL setup was a breeze, and I have a nice control panel for administration and “Quick Install” of WordPress.

My question is around how the Hestia features/WordPress install compares against the EasyEngine/WordOps stacks. It looks like the Hestia WordPress install is quite “vanilla”, though it does include some packages like fail2ban, NGINX etc. so it is opinionated in some ways.

Does the Hestia WordPress install automatically use these packages or do they need to be configured manually?

If the Hestia WordPress install is opinionated, why doesn’t it include other common packages such as memcached, Redis, OPcache, WP-CLI etc. by default?

While I prefer to use Hestia, the default EasyEngine/WordOps installations seem a bit more optimised unless I’m missing something?

Finally, have you considered extending the “Task Monitor” page with richer graphs showing realtime data? Or it could include Netdata by default like WordOps does?

Appreciate any thoughts!

[eris]

Hestia is not focussed on Wordpress but also support for email and so on.

Hestia installs Nginx, Fail2ban and other packages on default make sure to add the -a no flag during install to no install Apache2

Via v-add-user-wp-cli you can install wp cli on the user account. Also Hestia has made some improvements with the quick installer app to allow more options for install.

How ever we have limited time / developers and we can’t do everything at once. You can also install Redis, Memcached, Opcache if you need. If is fully open one thing we love about…

[alec]

Thanks for your quick reply @eris.

Hestia installs Nginx, Fail2ban and other packages on default make sure to add the -a no flag during install to no install Apache2

I think you’re suggesting if I want the fastest NGINX-only setup (no Apache) for WordPress installs, I should have passed -a=no when installing Hestia. I missed this during my install unfortunately, but good to know. Thankfully WordPress seems to be running well on what looks to be an Apache + NGINX stack by default.

Can you confirm this requires no extra configuration after WordPress Quick Install e.g. should “NGINX Helper” plugin not be installed by default if the server uses NGINX?

Via v-add-user-wp-cli you can install wp cli on the user account.

Thanks, good to know. I SSH into my VPS as user ubuntu and can switch to root, but neither of these are Hestia users that the v-add-user-wp-cli command recognises. So unless I’m missing something, I have to install WP-CLI manually in this case?

How ever we have limited time / developers and we can’t do everything at once. You can also install Redis, Memcached, Opcache if you need. If is fully open one thing we love about…

More than happy to contribute, just trying to get the big picture here. Sounds like you are open to the idea of the default WordPress installation becoming more “optimised” by including such packages by default (or opt-in during install)

[eris]

@alec

v-add-user-wp-cli

Use /usr/local/hestia/bin/v-add-user-wp-cli

[alec]

Yes I can run the v-add-user-wp-cli command, but it results in e.g. Error: user ubuntu doesn't exist.

It looks like v-add-user-wp-cli command only works for Hestia-created users, but I SSH in as ubuntu and typically run commands as this user using sudo, or I switch to root user with sudo su -.

[eris]

Yes it only works for Hestia users. Running wp-cli under a different user then the default hestia user will break the permissions unless you chown everything to the correct owner when you are done.

It is always smart to run shell command under the user you are working on.

After WPCLI is installed you can access it it vvia

/home/admin/.wp-cli

You can also download wpcli to your server and install on your server in /usr/bin/ folder