Continued…
Then I recreated my LAMP stack to support all my usual pages; WordPress, NextCloud, phpMyAdmin and OTRS ultimately. I built the bog standard info.php file, named it index.php so it was served up by default by apache (and so detected by Lets Encrypt and got my cerificate for all my sites at once.
Soon as I got on the MySQL database, I corrected it to fully support utf8mb4 character set, to incorporate multi-lingual posts and comments, and emojis 🤞. I found these instructions for MySQL 5.7 on Ubuntu 16.04, worked fine for the same MySQL on 18.04. This is also important for OTRS when I get that installed later this afternoon or tomorrow. OTRS won’t work without utf8mb4 support.
As an aside, figuring out where to apply mysql instructions in files was a bit arsey, since various instruction I’ve read references config files in /etc/mysql but the master control file is /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf and I suppose this may be a feature of Ubuntu 18.04. Still, found it in the end. The file suggested in some posts exists but has barely any config in it. If config is applied, and it contradicts the config in /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf then MySQL just doesn’t run. Best to apply everything in the main file.
I created phpMyAdmin first, configuring it the way I always have with 2 layer password authentication, one for access to the login page, one for the sql users login that phpMyAdmin uses by default. I then installed WordPress and imported my back-up. What worked nicely this time, for some unknown reason, was after importing the site from my back-up that I’d done first thing, I could change the permalink settings. When I did my export-import last week, from my AWS to this server, that didn’t work so well, and had to have my blogs posted with page id in the URL, rather than date and page title as you see here /2018/09/11/the-details-part-2/ for this page. Its nice to have that back.
Time now to reinstall nextcloud, paying attention to utf8mb4 nuances. I’ll write that up in details part 3.