WordPress installation on Synology box

For the past few days I have been struggling to install WordPress (manually, rather than using the Synology Wordpress package, so that I can have multiple sites) on my Synology 216-Play box, and hit many problems which I have managed to work my way through (or round) using tips from various internet forums, and the excellent musings of 'Sridhar' on his blog https://sridhar.blog/install-multiple-wordpress-sites-synology-nas/

He admits that his blog does not tackle the problem of access from outside your local network, which I was keen to do, so what follows is a combination of Sridhar's suggestions along with some of my own which together seem to work.

I don't guarantee that they will work for you, but I hope they might give you some help if ever you want to try the same.

There were quite a few unforeseen problems along the way, many down to the odd quirks in the Synology software, so if you want to read my solutions to those, please read the following posts which will appear shortly.

Many thanks,

Robert Eadie

Problems along the way

Firstly, the various problems I came up against.

• Whatever I tried, I kept on getting Server 500 errors whatever I tried at the WordPress installation.
• Most suggestions are to try 'localhost' or 127.0.0.1 as the hostname of your database (assuming it is on the Synology box).
• The only thing that worked for me using MarioDB 10,  was 'localhost:/run/mysqld/mysqld10.sock'
• Many thanks to Yves Lacroix whose comments on Sridhar's musings got me past that barrier.
• Wordpress itself needs direct FTP access to each of your sites, if you ever want to install new Themes, or plugins, or . . .
• That means that each site needs a separate user, and each of those users needs direct FTP access to the wordpress folder for that site.
• Synology does not make it easy (or even possible) to create a shared SUB-folder, nor to point web site root to a user home folder (which would have been easier).
• That resulted in my deciding to create a new shared folder (at the top level) to hold the wordpress software for each of my sites.
• You will of course need to access your Internet Router and setup 'Port Forwarding' both 80/443 for web traffic, and 21 for FTP, to your Synology box.  I have a BT Home Hub on which it is very straightforward, but see my detailed post shortly!