Raspberry Pi Project 01 – Web Server

So, just as a start, this isn’t a how to of any kind.  There are already plenty of tutorials on how to do whatever with the raspberry Pi.  Unless I’m pushing something unique, I don’t feel the need to provide another explanation of how to do the same thing a hundred other people have done.

I completed my first trial project on my Raspberry Pi of setting up a web server.  This is a pretty simple process that I have done dozens of times before on Ubuntu and Windows so it isn’t exactly an amazing feat.  The most amazing part is that I followed through on it instead of putting the Pi aside for “someday” like so many other projects.

The set up is really straight forward.

sudo apt-get install apache2

sudo apt-get install php

sudo apt-get install mysql

wget wordpress from wherever

sudo apt-get install vsftp

sudo mysql

create database wordpress

Futz with some permissions…

That’s it, pretty much the same as Ubuntu.  I guess this is a hot to after all.  I followed up by setting up WordPress through the WordPress interface.  I added a theme and some plug ins and created a few dummy posts.  Mostly I wanted to gage performance.  Granted, a single user web server sitting inside a firewall on a LAN is probably not the best way to gage functionality.

Everything ran fine though.  FTP uploads were a little slow, but I imagine part of that can be attributed to the memory card access speeds.  It wasn’t unbearably or unusably slow.

The main issue is that, I already run a private web server on a full blown machine inside my house.  It’s useful for playing with web dev stuff, I run a WordPress instance archiving all of my posts online together, I host a couple of other web apps for things like my webcams and Twitter analytics.  It is already running and does more than the Pi is probably capable of doing all at once.

Using my Pi as a single WordPress host is a waste of a good Pi.  It was a nice exercise to get familiar with the mechanics of the Pi, but it’s not really all that useful long term.  So I’ve wiped it out to move on to a new project.

I’ve been debating on what to use it for on my second Project.  I have been flip flopping between an XBMC media player and running Retro Pi to make it into an emulation station.  My main hang ups, the media player won’t be super useful without a media server to back it up.  I plan to buy a NAS later this year and start ripping all of my DVDs to it but that’s months off.  Retro Pi seems like the logical choice then except I have an old Netbook with a busted screen I plan to use to for building a retro arcade machine.  Still, it might be good to compare the Pi to the Netbook for the emulation station.  Also, I have more than one room so I could use two emulation boxes pretty easily.  I thought about using the Netbook guns to build a Stepmania/DDR box anyway, and it’s probably better suited to run Stepmania than the Pi is anyway.

Anyway, as usual, lots of ideas, lots of plans, maybe something fun will come out of it.

Ramen Junkie

Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”.  I write about my various hobbies here.  Mostly coding, photography, and music.  Sometimes I just write about life in general.  I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.