Chemical potential, as an important thermodynamic quantity, has been popularly used in thermodynamic modeling for complex systems, especially for those involving the phase transitions and chemical reactions. Here we present a chemical-potential-based multiphase lattice Boltzmann model, in which the nonideal force is directly evaluated by a chemical potential. The numerical computation is more efficient than the pressure-tensor-based model [Wen et al. Europhys. Lett. 112, 44002 (2015)10.1209/0295-5075/112/44002] because the calculations of the pressure tensor and its divergence are avoided. We have derived several chemical potentials of the popular equations of state from the free-energy density function. The theoretical analyses and numerical results support that the present model satisfies thermodynamics and Galilean invariance. An effective chemical-potential boundary condition is also implemented to investigate the wettability of a solid surface, and the contact angle can be linearly tuned by the surface chemical potential.