Bitnami | Visser I/O

Setting up a Cloudflare SSL certificate for Bitnami WordPress on Google Cloud Compute Engine

Bitnami WordPress on Google Cloud Compute Engine does not out of the box ship with SSL turned on, site owners need to secure communication to and from their website using SSL.

Here’s how to configure SSL using a free Cloudflare SSL certificate for Bitnami WordPress on Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Creating certificate files with Cloudflare

First we generate and download the SSL certificate files from Cloudflare.

1. Open up your site profile on Cloudflare.com
2. Switch to the Crypto tab
3. Within the Origin Certificates section click the Create Certificate button
4. Ensure the Let Cloudflare generate a private key and a CSR option is set to RSA
5. Click Next
6. With the Key format field set to PEM (Default) highlight and paste the contents of the Origin Certificate and Private Key blocks into separate new files on your Desktop:
  - Origin Certificate: server.crt
  - Private Key: server.key

Configuring Apache on your WordPress Bitnami instance

Now we connect with SSH to the hosting server; your Google Cloud Compute Engine instance. You can do this via the Google Cloud Platform > Compute Engine > VM Instances > Connect with SSH or with your preferred terminal client.
1. Open an SSH session to your Google Cloud Compute Engine instance
2. Navigate to the /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/ directory with the following terminal command:
```
 cd /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/
```
3. Delete or rename the existing server.crt and server.key files in this directory (I prefer to rename them to server.crt_legacy and server.key_legacy):
```
 sudo mv server.crt server.crt_legacy

 sudo mv server.key server.key_legacy
```
4. Create two new files in their place:
```
 sudo touch server.crt

 sudo touch server.key
```
5. With your preferred terminal text editor paste the contents of the two Cloudflare certificate files mentioned above into these new files on your hosting server
```
 sudo nano server.crt

 sudo nano server.key
```
6. Restart the Apache service
```
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
```

Enable SSL within Cloudflare

Open up your site profile on Cloudflare.com
Switch to the Crypto tab
Change the SSL dropdown from Flexible to Full
Change the Always use HTTPS option to On
Change the Automatic HTTPS Rewrites option to On

That’s it!

Turning off PageSpeed and OPcache in Bitnami Apache for Google Cloud Platform

Here’s how to turn off the Google PageSpeed module within Apache and PHP’s OPCache functionality that is enabled by default within Bitnami instances on Google Cloud Platform.

1. Establish a terminal session to your Google Cloud Platform instance with your preferred terminal client (e.g. Putty).
2. Open up /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf with your preferred file editor and find the following lines:Include conf/pagespeed_libraries.conf
  Include conf/pagespeed.conf
3. Comment them out to match the following lines:
  # Include conf/pagespeed.conf
  # Include conf/pagespeed_libraries.conf
4. Save changes and return to terminal prompt.
5. Open up /opt/bitnami/php/etc/php.ini with your preferred file editor and find the following line:opcache.enable=1
6. Comment it out and disable opcache.enable by matching the following lines:
  # opcache.enable=1
  opcache.enable=0
7. Save changes and return to terminal prompt.
8. Restart the Apache service with the following command:
  sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

That’s it 🙂

Hiding the Bitnami corner banner on new Google Cloud Compute Engine instances

By default new Bitnami instances show a corner banner on all pages. To remove this connect to your Google Cloud Compute Engine instance via SSH and enter the following commands:

sudo /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/bnconfig –disable_banner 1
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart nginx

That should be it. If you get the terminal error “Error: There has been an error.” running the bnconfig command try the following:

cd /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf
sudo nano httpd-app.conf
Comment out the following line:
Include “/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf/banner.conf”

to…

# Include “/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf/banner.conf”
Save changes
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart nginx

That’s it! 🙂

Fixing Installation Failed message on Bitnami WordPress and Google Cloud Compute Engine

Getting WordPress installed on Google’s Cloud Compute Engine service is super easy using the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform, the gotcha is the default permissions set during installation mean you cannot use the WordPress Administration to update Theme’s, Plugins or WordPress core itself.

To set the file and directory permissions correctly you will need to connect via SSH to the container that your WordPress instance is installed on.

Here’s how to set the directory and file permissions correctly, split up into the different WordPress core directories:

WordPress base directory

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

sudo chown bitnami:daemon -R /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs

wp-admin

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-admin -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-admin -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

sudo chown bitnami:daemon -R /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-admin

wp-includes

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-includes -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-includes -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

sudo chown bitnami:daemon -R /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-includes

wp-content

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

sudo find /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

sudo chown bitnami:daemon -R /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content

That’s it!