Self-hosting journey update, and WordPress: latest development from a super-newbie

@selfhosted

I must recap as I set my instance to delete 2-weeks-old posts.

Months ago, I talked about my very first journey with self-hosting my digital services, including my website.
As I’m not very skilled with sysadmin stuff, I use a YunoHost installation with all its pros and cons.

Having severe accessibility needs (I’m totally blind) I have limited choices for what concerns CMS software with related extensions if any. So after months of exploration and test, I’ve come back home. To WordPress.

Last time I updated Fediverse about my experience, I was struggling with multisite network giving an unpleasant error in the non-main site, such as “too_many_redirects”
Making it short, I discovered that YunoHost doesn’t let me run a multisite properly when installed in a subdomain such as blog.domain.tld
So I had forcefully to install it in the main domain, and a subdirectory such as domain.tld/wp

Now I’m concentrating on my theme, I will clone it with the plugin “CreateBlockTheme” then activate it network-wide.
I need a multisite for multilingual, as all current multilingual plugins have poor accessibility support, and are mostly paid.

Then I may need a new taxonomy registered to organize stories, the glossary plugin, SEO plugin, ActivityPub, and I should be all set!

The last, hard, challenge I have, is the fact that now my site runs into “domain.tld/permalink-post” for Italian, and “domain.tld/english” for English
The new one should run “domain.tld/wp/post” and “domain.tld/wp/english/post”

YunoHost doesn’t let me build a WordPress site in the root directory with multisite installed, so I must find the way to tell nginx I want the product to be physically on /wp/ but browser can point to domain.tld/post or domain.tld/english/post…

And if possible, this change to be in a file on its own, in order to be able to delete it without damaging the whole nginx conf.

Last detail, I’m on hostinger, kvm2 package. vps.

#experience #multisite #nginx #SelfHosting #WordPress #YunoHost

  • JayjaderEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    No idea how easy this will be to follow if you’re forced to rely on text-to-speech and/or other assistive technologies, but here goes:

    • to tell nginx the product is physically on /wp/, you probably want a root /wp directive
    • to tell nginx the browser can point to domain.tld/post or domain.tld/english/post, you probably want two location blocks (one for each url) that each contain a rewrite directive that massages the url requested by the browser into pointing to the correct post or page location.
    • for this to be in a file on it’s own, and assuming your nginx setup is pretty standard, you probably want to have the entire server block be in a file that lives in the sites-available directory and symbolically linked (“symlinked”) into the sites-enabled directory.

    For the rewrites, here is the link to the relevant documentation page: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_rewrite_module.html . You will need to understand the basics of how to write a Regular Expression, or get someone to write it for you. If you can’t find a human that’s available and willing to help, maybe a back-and-forth with an L.L.M. can get you to what you need (I don’t like suggesting L.L.M.s but being sighted myself I don’t really know if they’re better or worse than recommending you just work at learning how to do this on your own, given the current state of the web).

    • Elena Brescacin@poliversity.itOP
      1·
      7 days ago

      @Jayjader -
      I managed to make nginx work now it redirects domain.tld to domain.tld/wp

      with this one

      -—

      location = / {
      return 301 /wp/;
      }

      location ^~ /.well-known/ {
      rewrite ^/\.well-known/(.*)$ /wp/.well-known/$1 last;
      }

      location / {
      return 301 /wp$request_uri;
      }

      -—

      I honestly don’t know all of this language, but the intention is to make it work on ActivityPub - I can’t try federating my current test environment, I’m forced to try the federation on production site directly when it is available.

      Damn…
      Searching and asking my hosting provider makes me turn exhausted.

    • Elena Brescacin@poliversity.itOP
      1·
      7 days ago

      @Jayjader this is when AI could help more. To help me not getting lost into very long docs, with lots of tables and maybe graphs and screenshots
      but I’m afraid of allucinations