A Reasonably Pleasant Wordpress Setup with Docker

I recently had to help a customer troubleshoot a Wordpress setup. This isn’t a big deal, but it’d been long enough since the last time I had Wordpress running locally that I couldn’t remember the exact steps for getting MAMP, PHPMyAdmin, and the like running to actually get the site up.

We’ve been using Docker (and docker-compose) at work quite a bit, so I sought out a docker container that handled much of that setup for me.

As it turns out, the fine folks at Docker already have a guide.

The issue we came across is that while we can get Wordpress running, we can’t hack on it (notably, custom theme or plugin development).

So let’s resolve this. I’m assuming here that you’re fairly comfortable with Wordpress itself, and perhaps somewhat comfortable with Docker and Docker-Compose. I’m also assuming you’ve got Docker for Mac (or the equivalent for your platform) installed. I’m also assuming here that you’re relatively comfortable with your terminal (everything here assumes a *nix shell, like what you’d find if you’re using Linux or a Mac).

Let’s begin. We’re going to create a relatively pleasant setup where we can have our wordpress site running and where we can spin it up (and tear it down) as we desire.

(If you feel like skipping to the good stuff, all of our work below, genericized just a bit, can be found here)

First, let’s make some room:

$ mkdir wordpress_sites
$ cd wordpress_sites

Then we’ll create a file for our docker-compose setup, but we won’t put anything in it just yet (we will soon).

$ touch docker-compose.yml

Finally, we’ll get setup with Git (if you don’t yet use Git, don’t worry about this step):

$ git init .
$ touch .gitignore

Your .gitignore file should look like this (again, ignore this if you aren’t using Git):

look_a_dog/

Now we can get started on our actual docker-compose file, which we’ll use to orchestrate this whole process:

version: '3.3'

services:
  look_a_dog_wp:
    # We need a database
    depends_on:
      - db
    # We'll use the most recent Wordpress install
    image: wordpress:latest
    # We're going to stick all of our files in our
    # look_a_dog directory; this keeps it nice and separate
    # from our other sites (if applicable).
    volumes:
      - ./look_a_dog:/var/www/html
    ports:
    # We'll access our site on http://localhost:8999
      - "8999:80"
    restart: always
    environment:
      # We'll provide some SQL credentials -- these match what's
      # in our db section
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress

  # This is our MySQL database server
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    # We need a volume here, too, otherwise all of our posts
    # and users will disappear whenever we stop our server.
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: always
    # We'll set root DB credentials
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: somewordpress
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
      MYSQL_USER: wordpress
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress
volumes:
  db_data:

We’ve got our Docker-Compose file set up, so now we can run it:

$ docker-compose up

We should see a bunch of output (this process will take a few minutes). Once the output generally stops (assuming no error messages), you can do two things:

1. Navigate your fine self to http://localhost:8999 – you’ll be prompted to finish setup
2. Take a look inside your look_a_dog folder – you should see all of your normal Wordpress files (this folder previously did not even exist!). You’ll note that this is also the folder we git-ignored, so as to keep any updates here from affecting our base playground.

You can stop the containers with CTRL-C, and you can tear the whole thing down with docker-compose down (or delete it entirely with docker system prune and docker volume prune).

If you’re not using Git, you can proceed here exactly as you would normally. Updates inside the local folder are reflected on the Docker container, and vice-versa.

If you are using Git, what I’ll suggest is to get individual folders (for example, if you’re making a new theme, the folder containing that theme, e.g. wp-content/themes/dog_theme) under version control. You’ve already git-ignored the whole site directory, so you shouldn’t run into the strange set of maladies that come from having git repositories inside of git repositories, and you’ll be able to better collaborate with others.

Ultimately, what this gives you is a base wordpress install that you can freely hack on without the muss or fuss of working with MAMP/WAMP and running things locally.