A Docker Wordpress development environment by the team at Visible and some awesome contributors. Our goal is to make Wordpress development slightly less frustrating.
We wrote a series of articles explaining in depth the philosophy behind this project:
Well, to run a Docker environment, you will need Docker. The Dockerfile is only
for an Apache+PHP+Wordpress container, you will need a MySQL
or MariaDB
container to run a website. We use Docker Compose 1.6+ for the orchestration.
This project has 2 parts: the Docker environment and a set of tools for theme development. To quickly get started, you can simply run the following:
# copy the files
git clone https://github.com/visiblevc/wordpress-starter.git
# navigate to example directory
cd wordpress-starter/example
# start the website at localhost:8080
docker-compose up -d && docker-compose logs -f wordpress
NOTE: If you run on MacOS with Docker in VirtualBox, you will want to
forward the port by running this
VBoxManage controlvm vm-name natpf1 "tcp8080,tcp,127.0.0.1,8080,,8080"
. If you
use another port than 8080
, change it in the command.
PHP Version | Tags |
---|---|
7.4 | latest latest-php7.4 <version>-php7.4 |
7.3 | latest latest-php7.3 <version>-php7.3 |
7.2 | latest-php7.2 <version>-php7.2 |
If you need a specific version, look at the Changelog
To access the Wordpress Admin at /wp-admin
, the default values are as follows:
Credential | Value | Notes |
---|---|---|
Username or Email | root or admin@wordpress.com |
Can be changed with the ADMIN_EMAIL environment variable |
Password | root |
Uses the same value as the DB_PASS environment variable |
Credential | Value | Notes |
---|---|---|
Hostname | db |
Can be changed with the DB_HOST environment variable NOTE:: Must match database service name |
Username | root |
|
Password | Must be set using the DB_PASS environment variable |
|
Database Name | wordpress |
Can be changed with the DB_NAME environment variable |
Admin Email | admin@${DB_NAME}.com |
Notes:
boolean
environment variableswordpress
Variable | Default Value | Description |
---|---|---|
DB_USER |
root |
Username for both the database and the WordPress installation (if not importing existing) |
DB_PASS ✅ |
Password for the database. Value must match MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD set in the db service |
|
DB_HOST |
db |
Hostname for the database |
DB_NAME |
wordpress |
Name of the database |
DB_PREFIX |
wp_ |
Prefix for the database |
DB_CHARSET |
utf8 |
Select a charset for the wordpress database (legacy versions might not be utf8) |
SERVER_NAME |
localhost |
Set this to <your-domain-name>.<your-top-level-domain> if you plan on obtaining SSL certificates |
ADMIN_EMAIL |
admin@${DB_NAME}.com |
Administrator email address |
WP_LOCALE |
en_US |
Set the site language |
WP_DEBUG |
'false' |
Click here for more information |
WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY |
'false' |
Click here for more information |
WP_DEBUG_LOG |
'false' |
Click here for more information |
WP_VERSION |
latest |
Specify the WordPress version to install. Accepts any valid semver number, latest , or nightly for beta builds. |
THEMES |
Space-separated list of themes you want to install in either of the following forms
|
|
PLUGINS |
Space-separated list of plugins you want to install in either of the following forms:
|
|
MULTISITE |
'false' |
Set to 'true' to enable multisite |
PERMALINKS |
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ |
A valid WordPress permalink structure tag |
URL_REPLACE |
Value must be a full replacement URL to use in development environments if importing a database for development use. Example: If your live site's URL is Note: If you are running Docker using Docker Machine, your replacement url MUST be the output of the following command: |
|
EXTRA_PHP |
Extra PHP code to add to IMPORTANT NOTE: All |
db
Variable | Default Value | Description |
---|---|---|
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD ✅ |
Must match DB_PASS of the wordpress service |
wp-cli
You can access wp-cli by running npm run wp ...
. Here are some examples:
npm run wp plugin install <some-plugin>
npm run wp db import /data/database.sql
If you have an exported .sql
file from an existing website, drop the file into
the data/
folder. The first time you run the container, it will detect the SQL
dump and use it as a database. If it doesn't find one, it will create a fresh
database.
If the SQL dump changes for some reason, you can reload the database by running:
docker-compose exec wordpress /bin/bash "wp db import $(find /data/*.sql | head -n 1) --allow-root"
If you want to create a dump of your development database, you can run:
docker-compose exec wordpress /bin/bash -c 'wp db export /data/dump.sql --allow-root'
Finally, sometimes your development environment runs on a different domain than
your live one. The live will be example.com
and the development
localhost:8080
. This project does a search and replace for you. You can set
the URL_REPLACE: localhost:8080
environment variable in the
docker-compose.yml
.
docker-compose.yml
# If something isn't shown, assume it's the same as the examples above
version: "3"
services:
wordpress:
ports:
- 80:80
- 443:443
restart: always
environment:
SERVER_NAME: mysite.com
DB_PASS: ${SECURE_PASSWORD} # Stored in .env file
volumes:
- ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt
- ./data:/data
# anything else you'd like to be able to back up
db:
restart: always
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${SECURE_PASSWORD} # Stored in .env file
We highly recommend securing your site with SSL encryption. The Let's Encrypt and Certbot projects have made doing this both free (as in beer) and painless. We've incorporated these projects into this project.
Assuming your site is running on your production host, follow the below steps to obtain and renew SSL certificates.
You should first set SERVER_NAME
to <your-domain-name>.<your-top-level-domain>
in your docker-compose.yml
$ docker-compose ps
Name Command State
---------------------------------------------------------
project_db_1 docker-entrypoint.sh mysqld Up
project_wordpress_1 docker-php-entrypoint /run.sh Up
$ docker-compose exec wordpress /bin/bash
root@4e16c7fe4a10:/app# certbot --apache
$ docker-compose ps
Name Command State
---------------------------------------------------------
project_db_1 docker-entrypoint.sh mysqld Up
project_wordpress_1 docker-php-entrypoint /run.sh Up
$ docker-compose exec wordpress /bin/bash
root@4e16c7fe4a10:/app# certbot renew
You can find Development instructions in the Wiki.