Verdant TCS

How to Install Non-WordPress Sites/Applications on vCanopy

2 min read

WARNING

Please do not install non-WordPress applications on servers that contain your WordPress websites as this may void the warranty of that server and interfere with our ability to serve you effectively on support.

Intro

We’ve debated on whether to create this article or not for some time. Technically we’re built for WordPress, and while you can run other PHP-based applications (and they will probably perform pretty damn well), it’s not something we can ever provide direct support for.

Please heed the warning box above and install your site/application directly on its own server.

Below is a quick basic rundown of the process. 

Step 1. Install a WordPress Site 

The easiest way to install a non-WordPress site on vCanopy is to first create the site as a WordPress site using our app and then provision an SSL certificate. This will create all configurations on the server that will serve files from this site’s directory.

Please see the following article and SSL archive to get started:

Easily Deploy a vCanopy WordPress Site

Provisioning SSL Certificates

A NOTE ON SSL CERTIFICATES

In our testing these have been provisioned without any issues even when after removing WordPress from htdocs, but that testing was also very limited.

Step 2. Remove the WordPress Files

Next, remove all of the WordPress files from your htdocs directory.
To remove the WordPress files, you will first need to SSH into your server. Please see the following guides to get started:

Step 1. Generate your SSH Key

Step 2. Add your SSH Key to vCanopy (also see Add default SSH Keys)

Step 3. Connect to your server by SSH as Root user (we like and use Termius)

Now navigate to your website’s directory with the following command (replacing “yourwebsite.com” with your own domain name):

cd /var/www/yourwebsite.com

Next, remove the htdocs directory with the following:

rm -R htdocs

​This will remove all WordPress files leaving you with a clean slate to install your application.
Now we just need to recreate the htdocs folder with:

mkdir htdocs

Step 3. Upload your site/application

Depending on how you’re transferring your site/application, you can pretty much take it from here if you’re downloading via wget.

If you’re uploading over SFTP, please see the following guides to get started:

Connect to a vCanopy Server by SFTP as the Root User

Connect to a vCanopy Server by SFTP as a System User

Step 4. Import your database (if applicable)

If your site has a database you should be able to import that directly into the database that was created for your WordPress site through PHPMyAdmin:

Connect to your vCanopy Site Database with PHPMyAdmin

NOTE: The database user that we create doesn’t have permission to create databases, but you should have no issues dropping the tables in the database we create and uploading your own.

DATABASE CREDENTIALS

Your database credentials are safely stored outside of the htdocs directory inside

/var/www/yourwebsite.com/wp-config.php.
In step 2 when we deleted htdocs, we did not delete the
wp-config.php
file. If you need them, you can find your database credentials here.

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