Running WordPress on Docker

WordPress runs on a variety of platforms, but last time I was developing I was using a MAMP stack - Mac Apache MySQL & PHP. It's been a while since I was working on WordPress sites and I no longer have MAMP installed on my machine, however I do have Docker running. Since I can create a LAMP stack (Linux... AMP) running on my Mac. This is a bit closer to what the site would be running on in the real world, plus I can deploy the Docker app to something like a DigitalOcean Droplet quickly.

Let's start by creating a folder for this to contain all the configs and data.

mkdir wordpress-docker && cd wordpress-docker

Then add a Docker Compose file, which is used to define and run multiple containers easily.

touch docker-compose.yml

Next we need to configure the file itself, so in your favorite editor open up docker-compose.yml. A few things are configured in the Docker Compose:

• The version of Docker Compose to use
• The services (containers) we are configuring. These consist of the database and the code.
• The image for each container to use
• What ports to open and bind to the host (your machine). This allows each container to speak to the other when needed
• An env file, where variables like database passwords can be stored so they can be exempt from being committed to source
• And in the case of the wp container a link to the database container so it can be accessed by name as mysql since the wordpress container image uses this to connect.

version: "2"
services:
  db:
    image: mariadb
    ports:
      - "8081:3306"
    env_file:
      - .env
  wp:
    image: wordpress
    volumes:
      - ./html/:/var/www/html
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    env_file:
      - .env
    links:
      - db:mysql

Create a .env files for the variables (You could also use 2 .env files, one for each container). Note that both passwords MUST be the same!

 MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=SuperSecretTellNobody!
 WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=SuperSecretTellNobody!

That's it for config, now it's time to start your Docker containers. The following command will start to download and build the images and then boot them up. Running it with -d runs it in the background once

docker-compose up -d

Once it's booted up and is ready to go you will see something like this:

Starting wordpress-docker_db_1 ... done
Starting wordpress-docker_wp_1 ... done

In your browser head over to http://localhost:8080/ and you'll be welcomed by the initial setup screens.

If you take a look in your directory you'll have a ./html sub-directory that contains all your WordPress files just like a normal WordPress install.

Note: You can stop docker by running docker compose down