Students Tutorial – Allow WordPress Permalinks on Nginx or Apache2

Installing WordPress is not all to it. For WordPress to function properly, one must make sure all the correct settings are in place. This brief tutorial shows you how to correctly configure Nginx or Apache2 webservers to allow WordPress permalinks.

On this site, we’ve written many detailed tutorials on installing WordPress on Nginx and Apache2. Many of our tutorials written are done so that new students and users don’t experience issues after setting things up.

To read a previous post on installing WordPress, please search our site. There are many well written posts that will help you do that.

Step 1: Setting up Apache2 to allow WordPress Permalinks

To setup Apache2 to allow WordPress Permalinks you first need to enable Apache2 rewrite module. This can be done by running the commands below

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Then restart Apache2 server by running the commands below

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

After restarting Apache2, go and add the below directory block into Apache2 VirtualHost file for WordPress. On Ubuntu the default file is at

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

The the block below and save the file.

Directory /var/www/html>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
 Directory>

The change your changes and restart Apache2

location / {
    index index.php index.html index.htm;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;