WordPress Migration to Homelab: Live Ops 002

The WordPress migration homelab project that started as a quick detour turned into a two-hour deep dive — because nothing in the homelab ever goes exactly to plan.

If you caught Live Ops 001, you know we got the Matrix server almost running — right up until an SSL certificate issue stopped us cold. The problem? itguyeric.com was hosted on Namecheap’s EasyWP platform, which doesn’t let you export your own certificates. The fix was obvious: move the site home. And with a $94 renewal coming up in about a week, there was really no reason not to.

The plan was to spin up a fresh Fedora server VM, deploy WordPress in a Podman container, migrate the site using the All-in-One WP Migration plugin, and wire it all up behind NGINX Proxy Manager with a Let’s Encrypt cert that covers both itguyeric.com and matrix.itguyeric.com. Clean, tidy, two birds one stone. In practice: wrong ISO architecture, a MariaDB port conflict, a file permissions hang, and a Matrix federation API that kept failing despite the federation tester saying everything was fine. Classic.

By the end of the stream, WordPress was running locally and the Matrix server was showing green check marks on the self-check — but federation between accounts still wasn’t cooperating. Eric called it to go take care of family, with a promise to sort out the remaining certificate and domain config issues in a follow-up.

The WordPress migration homelab journey continues — subscribe so you don’t miss Live Ops 003 when it drops. Audio version of the main show is always at podcast.itguyeric.com.