Installing WordPress within Subdirectory

2 minute read | By Christopher Maldonado

Using Azure’s Marketplace item for WordPress on App Serivce to install WordPress within a subdirectory instead of root.

Deploying WordPress on App Services

This post assumes that the Azure Marketpleace item for WordPress on App Services is being utitilze. If this has not been deployed yet, please do so by following the steps in the following article:

Quickstart: Create a WordPress site - Azure App Service

Settings to Update

Once we have WordPress installed on Azure App Service, browse to your newly created site to ensure it has been installed and loaded within the root of your site.

After everything has loaded up correctly, we will need to add a new Application Setting.

Key: SKIP_WP_INSTALLATION
Value: true

This will ensure that the installation portion of the startup script does not execute.

From the Azure Portal, navigate to the App Service and open SSH. You can also access it via the following link updated for your site: https://your-site-name.scm.azurewebsites.net/webssh/host

Here we will complete a few steps:

  1. Move content to new subdirectory
  2. Update index.php file
  3. Update wp-config.php file

Moving content to new subdirectory

With SSH open, navigate to the /home/site/wwwroot/ directory. Here we will create our new subdirectory. For this example, we will use blog as our new subdirectory. Once the subdirectory is created, we will move everything within the folder.

cd /home/site/wwwroot
mkdir blog
mv *.* blog/
mv wp-admin blog/
mv wp-content blog/
mv wp-includes blog/

Make a copy of the index.php file and place it in the root. This will allow the site to be accessible from the root of the domain as well as the new blog subdirectory.

cp blog/index.php index.php

Update index.php

In order to make the site accessible via the root, we will need to update the index.php file in the root directory. Use a text editor of your choice and update the following:

# From this
require __DIR__ . '/wp-blog-header.php';

# To this
require __DIR__ . '/blog/wp-blog-header.php';

Update wp-config.php

The last thing we need to modify is the wp-config.php file within the new subdirectory. Make the following changes to reflect your new subdirectory as well.

# From this
define('WP_HOME', $http_protocol . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
define('WP_SITEURL', $http_protocol . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

# To this
define('WP_HOME', $http_protocol . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/blog');
define('WP_SITEURL', $http_protocol . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/blog');

Conclusion

Once all settings have been updated, your WordPress site should now be accessible via the new subdirectory.

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