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Accelerate and Secure your Wordpress Installation

ngrok works out of the box with any up-to-date Wordpress installation where you have access to the host machine's terminal and filesystem.

ngrok improves your existing Wordpress installation by:

  • Managing and auto-renewing your TLS certificates
  • Distributing and accelerating your blog on a global content delivery network
  • Protecting your blog from DDoS attacks with our firewall

1. Reserve a domain​

Navigate to the Domains section of the ngrok dashboard and click New + to reserve a free static domain like https://your-blog.ngrok.app or a custom domain you already own.

We'll refer to this domain as $NGROK_DOMAIN from here on out.

2. Create a Traffic Policy file​

On the system where Wordpress runs, create a file named wordpress.yaml and paste in the following policy:

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What's happening here? This policy rewrites the Host header of every HTTP request to localhost so that Wordpress accepts the requests.

3. Start your Wordpress endpoint​

On the same system where Wordpress runs, start the agent on port 80, which is the default for Wordpress, and referencing the wordpress.yaml file you just created.

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4. Try out your Wordpress endpoint​

Visit the domain you reserved either in the browser or in the terminal using a tool like curl. You should see the app or service at the port connected to your internal Agent Endpoint.

Optional: Restrict access to the admin dashboard​

The WP Admin dashboard is protected by a username and password, but is often subjected to attacks. You can use the restrict-ips Traffic Policy action to allow only yours or other trusted IPs.

Edit your wordpress.yaml file with the following policy, replacing $YOUR_IP.

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What's happening here? This policy first checks whether an HTTP request's URL contains the /wp-admin path. If it does, then it applies the restrict-ips action to allow only the addresses you explicitly added. Then, as before, the policy rewrites the Host header of every HTTP request to localhost so that Wordpress accepts the requests.

Finally, restart your ngrok agent to apply the new policy.

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What's next?​

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