I prefer to install WordPress via Subversion, which makes updating easier. We’ll have to install Subversion on the server first:

$ sudo aptitude install subversion

After that, the WordPress Codex has a guide to the rest of the install.

Nothing further is needed, unless you want fancy rewrites. In that case, we’ll have to make a change to your Nginx vhost config at /etc/nginx/sites-available/mydomain.com. Add the following to your server block under location / {:

# wordpress fancy rewrites
  if (-f $request_filename) {
            break;  
        }       
        if (-d $request_filename) {
            break;  
        }       
        rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;

While we’re here, I usually tell Nginx to cache static files by adding the following right above the location / { block:

# serve static files directly
location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|css)$ {
    root  /home/user/public_html/mydomain.com/public;
    expires 7d;
    break;
}

That’ll go in the https server section, too. Now, enable rewrites in your WordPress config. I use the following “custom” structure:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Then, restart Nginx:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

And there you have it! You know have a working, new web server and mail server.

(Previously, we did a basic setup, installed a web server, and installed a mail server.)