Creating a Digital Ocean Droplet for the Rocket Stack
This guide dates from 2017 and covers preparing a Digital Ocean droplet for our old managed Rocket Stack build service. It is kept for reference. If you are building a server today, follow our current stack guides linked below and use any current Ubuntu LTS (24.04 at the time of writing).
If you have purchased, or are thinking of purchasing, the Rocket Stack, here are the steps you need to take in order to get your droplet ready for us to build upon. For a modern build from scratch, see our WordPress stack configuration, customisation and optimisation guide and our walkthrough for installing the fastest WordPress stack with MySQL 8.
You need your own SSH keys
Firstly, you need to have your own SSH keys. If you are using PuttyGen to generate keys you want to save the private key and then copy and paste the openssh public key from the middle of the PuttyGen window to your Digital Ocean droplet. You can keep it saved in a file if you wish, but do not mix up your public openssh key with the public putty key.
PuttyGen can create 4 key files: a public and private putty format key and a public and private openssh key.
You only need 2 of these files: the private putty key and the public openssh key.
If you need more info on SSH keys, Digital Ocean have an article on how to generate SSH keys with different platforms and why SSH keys are great for security, and we cover our own approach in how to use SSH keys to access your WordPress servers.
Always authenticate with SSH keys rather than passwords. Keys are far harder to brute force and let you disable password login on the server entirely.
Private Putty SSH Key
The private putty key is used to connect to your server using Filezilla and is far more secure than passwords.
Public OpenSSH Key
The public openssh key will be added to your Digital Ocean droplet through their web page when creating a droplet (or /root/.ssh/authorized_keys, which you can edit directly with Filezilla if you wish).
Once you have your 2 keys, you are ready to proceed.
Create a Digital Ocean droplet and add your SSH key and our SSH deployment key
Choose Ubuntu (any current LTS, such as 24.04), any location, any size, and add two SSH keys to your new droplet.
The first SSH key you should add is your own Public OpenSSH key.
The second SSH key to add is our Rocket Stack deployment key which lets us build your server. Our key is:
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAi7/vShBzmRtZcM/YS+Law7q6XthEx9IFewohmUnY9actS9enCOg4fH/sf/on4sMjlVwSkh0tuhFuHYJef7gZkB1yTL14n0+WtBFKKrW8yot8KZ9adK1SDrGX4WJUtqrhMPy50kh67kIEoK+20jxKe/OMwKwyQ48SpOIo59K6/8uvurGRD2B0pkEoThnEhKBrDD1tmVimP0jcBv9xQlkX2AfssuCZwAmfW7wuVo3XBzreWR0SvzeBIlI4ivHR4OinmUVQhDXnWZLsb8Ugjc+0IY70PUD8IS1AUXoyIIOJJ+/YclTf6srniOw3808eIlBgzQnjIOgKinlTF/vvxM6Xsw== rsa-key-20170427Point a domain name at your new droplet
We use domain names in our deployment process which makes the entire process smoother.
So to get everything ready for us to build, the final step you need to complete is to point a domain name at the IP address of your new droplet.
For example, you might like to point dev.yourdomain.com at the new droplet, or a completely different domain name.
Summary
Once you have a domain name pointing at your new droplet, and that droplet has our Rocket Stack SSH key on it, your droplet is ready to be built.
From your My Account page, visit your Rocket Stack order (or place a new order at this point) and in the box where it asks you for your domain name, enter the domain name and submit. We will then build your Rocket Stack for you and email you WordPress access credentials.
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