A quick blog post to help you get up and running with WordPress, locally on your Chromebook!  

I struggled going the traditional route of getting Apache2 to work properly on chroot, on my Chromebook, and eventually gave up on it. Luckily, there are some great, open source installers that had me up and running fast!  However, the documentation wasn't very straight forward, for getting Wordpress started on the Chromebook terminal.  So, here's how to get a local version of WordPress up and running on your Chromebook.

Prerequisites

A Chromebook running Crouton/Ubuntu 16.04 in developer mode.  There are many great tutorials for how to get that started.  Check out this Google search! ?

Download XAMPP

Thanks Apache Friends for sharing your Apache package!

1. Download the "XAMPP for Linux installer" at https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

2. Set the file to be executable:

chmod 755 [file name]
//example: chmod 755 xampp-linux-x64-7.3.1-0-installer.run

3.  Start the setup:

sudo ./[file name]  
//example: sudo ./xampp-linux-x64-7.3.1-0-installer.run

4.  The terminal will then guide you through the installation.  Select yes to launch XAMPP once completed.  You can manually start XAMPP by the following command:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

5.  If you see any errors, you may need to install net-tools:

sudo apt install net-tools

6.  You can check that all is running by entering the following url into your browser, and verifying you see the XAMPP welcome page:

http://localhost/dashboard  

Install Wordpress

Special thanks to Bitnami for the Wordpress Installer!

1. Download the Wordpress Installer for Linux from https://bitnami.com/stack/wordpress/installer

2. Set the file to be executable:

chmod 755 [file name]
//example: chmod 755 bitnami-wordpress-5.0.3-2-module-linux-x64-installer.run

3. Start the setup:

sudo ./[file name]
//example: sudo ./bitnami-wordpress-5.0.3-2-module-linux-x64-installer.run

4. The terminal will then guide you through the installation.  Make a note of where you make the install.  By default, it should be the /opt/lampp directory.  Select yes to launch Bitnami Wordpress Stack once completed.

Get Blogging!

You can find all of your wordpress files in this directory: /opt/lampp/apps/wordpress/htdocs.  You should be able to see your Wordpress site running locally by entering http://localhost/wordpress/ into the browser, and you can log in by entering http://localhost/wordpress/wp-login.php.

Some Final Helpful Tips

Your local server will occasionally turn off.  You can start it with the following:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

You may occasionally need to restart your server.  You can do this with the following:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp restart

Finally, you may notice some permission errors when trying to upload files to your wordpress site.  You can fix that by modifying the permissions of your wordpress uploads file.  Navigate to your wp-content folder, and enter the following:

sudo chmod -R 0755 uploads