2.3 Setting Up a Database

Hey, welcome back to the WordPress secure setup guide. In this lesson, we're gonna go through setting up a database for your site. So, back in cpanel and what we're gonna do is use the MySQL database wizard to set up our database. So, in the database's section, hit the MySQL database wizard. Now the first step here is gonna be creating a name for your database, and this is where the security measures begin. In order to gain access to your database, a person needs the name of the database, a username, and a password. So you want to make all three of these things as obscure as possible. So for example, if I'm setting up a site called KezzBracey.com, I'm not gonna set up the database to be Kezz Bracey. We don't want it to be anything obvious. And this might seem a bit silly but what I personally like to do when I'm creating a database name is just mash the keyboard to come up with a name. So there we go, good luck guessing that one. And you notice there is also a prefix here, and this is pretty common on hosting accounts. Mine's obscured and you can't see it for just the same reason that I'm telling you to come up with a random database name. Make sure that you never ever share, any details of your databases publicly. But just be aware that if you see a prefix like that, that's a part of your actual database name that you gonna need to provide to WordPress during the set up process later. So we have our name and we'll hit next step. All right, so now what we need to do is set up a user. This user is gonna have access to the database and WordPress will access the database through this user. Now for the username, I like to do the same thing as when I'm setting up a database name, just smash on the keyboard until you have enough letters. So there we go, that's a nice random username. Now for the password, we're gonna use this inbuilt password generator. So just click that that will generate a password for you. I need to copy this password and just put it into a notepad because you're gonna need to provided this password as part of your WordPress set up. So, check the box to say you have copied this into a safe place and hit Use Password. Fill that into these two fields. Now, would they create user button. All right, now what we have here is a set of privileges that we can provide to the user that we just created. And what we're actually going to do here is we're going to check the old privileges button and this is gonna allow this user to do anything that they want to the database. If at some point you need to really, really lock down your security to a really, really tight degree, you can actually uncheck some of these privileges. However if you do, you may find that certain WordPress upgrades won't work if WordPress needs to modify the database in order to roll out a new upgrade. So, we're not going to be doing that restricting privileges in this process but I will include a link below where you can look at the privileges that you can set if you do want to really lock everything down as tight as possible. If you do that, you'll just have to be aware of some of the roadblocks that you might encounter along the way. So now we'll click next step. And that is the whole thing finished. So we've got our database done and we've created a user with the correct access privileges and a secure password. So now what we're gonna do is copy this string here, because this is giving us our user name and a database name because we'll need both of those two, when we install WordPress. So we just copy those and add it into our notepad. All right, so now our database is all ready to go, our files are all uploaded with the correct permissions. So now we can run the WordPress installation process, and that's what we're gonna be doing in the next lesson. I'll see you there.