📝 Blog Post #3
Title: Learning to Automate My WordPress Server at SLC
When I first started working with WordPress at St. Lawrence College, I had no idea how much was going on behind the scenes. Sure, I could post blogs and customize themes, but this latest project taught me what really goes into managing a website — especially when it comes to monitoring and backups.
Over the last couple of weeks, I learned how to automate my WordPress server using Linux shell scripts, cron jobs, Discord webhooks, and cloud storage. At first, it sounded overwhelming, but once I broke it down and worked through each part, it turned into one of the most satisfying learning experiences I’ve had so far.
🖥️ Setting Up Monitoring Alerts
One of the first tasks was to set up a monitoring script. The goal was to make sure my server could check its own CPU usage, available memory, and disk space. If any of those went over a certain limit (like 90% usage), the script would send an alert to my Discord server.
To make that happen, I created a Discord webhook and added it to my monitor.sh script. I used the top, free, and df commands to get the system stats. Then I set up a cron job to run the script every 10 minutes automatically.
The first time I saw my Discord bot post an alert saying “🔥 CPU usage is at 100%” — I was shocked… and also kind of proud! That meant my script was actually working in real-time, just like it should.
💾 Automating Backups with rclone
The second major task was setting up automated backups. I needed to create a script that could:
- Dump my WordPress MySQL database
- Compress my entire WordPress directory (
/var/www/html) - Upload the final backup to Google Drive using
rclone
At first, I struggled with getting the Google Drive connection to work from my VPS, especially because it doesn’t have a browser. I had to use rclone’s manual authorization mode by generating the token from my local PC and pasting it into the server.
Once that was done, I created a wp-backup.sh script that runs every day at 3 AM. It creates a .tar.gz file that contains both the database and website files, and it uploads them to Google Drive automatically. I even added a line to delete old backups that are more than 7 days old to save space.
It felt great to know that my website was backed up daily, without me having to remember to do anything.
🧪 Testing and Troubleshooting
There were definitely some challenges along the way. For example, my MySQL user didn’t have the right permissions, so I had to add the --no-tablespaces flag to make the database dump work. I also ran into an issue where the webhook wasn’t sending alerts — I fixed it by lowering the thresholds temporarily to force a test alert.
I learned how to test one thing at a time and not get discouraged when something didn’t work right away. Eventually, everything came together.
📚 What I Learned
This project taught me a lot more than just technical commands. I learned how to automate tasks, how to think like a sysadmin, and how important it is to have a backup and monitoring system in place — even for a student project.
Most importantly, it taught me how to troubleshoot and problem-solve. If something didn’t work, I looked up commands, tested things out, and asked for help when I needed it.
Now, I can proudly say that my WordPress site:
- Sends alerts to Discord when something is wrong ✅
- Backs itself up every day to Google Drive ✅
- Can be restored easily if anything breaks ✅
This assignment was a big step forward for me in understanding how real servers are managed, and I’m glad I got to experience it.