Visible Wordpress Starter

A Docker Wordpress development environment by the team at Visible and some awesome contributors. Our goal is to make Wordpress development slightly less frustrating.

• Introduction
• Example
• Requirements
• Getting Started
• Available Images
• Default Wordpress Admin Credentials
• Default Database Credentials
• Service Environment Variables
  • wordpress
  • db
• Workflow Tips
  • Using wp-cli
  • Working with Databases
• Using in Production
• Contributing

Introduction

We wrote a series of articles explaining in depth the philosophy behind this project:

• Intro: A slightly less shitty WordPress developer workflow
• Part 1: Setup a local development environment for WordPress with Docker
• Part 2: Setup an asset pipeline for WordPress theme development
• Part 3: Optimize your wordpress theme assets and deploy to S3

Requirements

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.

Getting started

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.

Available Images

If you need a specific version, look at the Changelog

Default Wordpress Admin Credentials

To access the Wordpress Admin at /wp-admin, the default values are as follows:

Default Database Credentials

Service Environment Variables

Notes:

• Variables marked with ✅ are required
• Single quotes must surround boolean environment variables

wordpress

db

Workflow Tips

Using 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

Working with Databases

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.

Using in Production

Adjustments to 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

SSL Certificates

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.

Obtaining 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

Renewing Certificates

$ 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

Contributing

You can find Development instructions in the Wiki.