Host Your Website on Raspberry Pi (2024)

Now connect your raspberry pi to home router using a Ethernet cable. the ada-fruit image comes with SSH enabled so you can connect via SSH immediately.

now you should try to open a SSH session via putty toraspberrypi.local or the speccific IP address( if you have ur HDMI connected it should be there on you screen, or go to ur router config page(usually 192.168.0.1) and check for raspberry pi under DHCP). you can log in to the raspberry pi with user name :pi and password :raspberry.

once you have a new installation there are a few things you should do to get things going, that includes expanding your root file system to fit the entire memory card and changing the user name and pasword. executing
sudo raspi-config
will take to to the config page where you can configure your PI.

Now you have to install a server on the raspberry pi, the easiest is the Apache Server (Lighttpd also works if you are looking for something lighter) run the following commands to install Apache, PHP5, PHP5 mod for apache and MYSQL( if you are planning to use a CMS or a database.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5

now you should allow overrides by editing the 000-default file, you can do that using the following comands..

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

now edit the following lines

change "AllowOverride None" -to "AllowOverride ALL".

now execute

sudo service apache2 restart

to restart apache witht your new settings

now your site should be up and running u can go to /var/ and change the permissions on www, making it writable.

cd /var/
sudo chmod 777 /www

this will enable you to login using WINSCPand upload HTML pages to your new site. open the browser on your PC and point to 192.168.xx.xx (ip address of you raspberry pi) to view the default page.

You can also install and SQL server using the following comands, with a PHP and SQL running on your server u can have a CMs like Drupal running on it.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql

Now you have a website that can be accessed from online, but most of you (like me) dont have a static IP (its too expensive), which means every 1day or so , your ISP might change your ipaddress(gateway) so you cant always type in the ipaddress and expect to see your website, so solve this we use a no-ip service that gets installed on the raspberry pi. This service runs on the raspberry pi and tells the no-ip server what your IP address is. No-IP gives you a domain name that will point to your last updated IP, all you have to do in make a free account at set and regiter you hostname it will look like (rspi.no-ip.org) you could also go for a premium domain name. once that is done, type in the following commands to install the service....

cd /usr/local/src/

sudo wget http://www.no-ip.com/client/linux/noip-duc-linux.tar.gz

tar xf noip-duc-linux.tar.gz

sudo rm noip-duc-linux.tar.gz

cd noip-2.1.9-1/

sudo make install

after the install is finished, it will automatically start the configuration, enter the username and password of the no-ip.org to finish the installation.

now you have your server set up successfully now all you have to do is make sure it runs every time you start the raspberry pi. there a couple of ways to do this, this i feel is the most easy one.

cd /etc/
sudo nano rc.local

add the following line , in the rc.local file to make noip service run during startup
sudo noip2

ctrl-x

now reboot the PI by the following comand

sudo reboot

after setting up the no-ip service, you should be able to access the website hosted on your raspberry pi using the domain name you chose. You can test if the noip service is running by the followingcommand.

sudonoip2 -S

if you see an valid PID, it means you have the service now running.... upload a few pages and hav fun!!