Dockerize WordPress with themes, plugins and common configuration

This article is the continuation of WordPress with Docker, AWS (ECS, Code Pipeline, Load Balancer, RDS, EFS) Complete Series. For better understating, please start from the beginning of the series.

In this article, we will create the following files and folders

Let’s create files and folders

# Creating Dockfile
touch Dockerfile

# Creating development directory and docker-compose file
mkdir development && touch development/docker-compose.yml

# Creating themes and plugins directories
mkdir themes && plugins

# Creating config directory and uploads.ini file
mkdir config && touch config/uploads.ini

# Creating entrypoint-child.sh file
touch entrypoint-child.sh

Dockerfile

Paste the following content into the Dockerfile

FROM wordpress:latest

# Copying Themes and Plugins into the wordpress image
COPY ["themes","/usr/src/wordpress/wp-content/themes"]
COPY ["plugins","/usr/src/wordpress/wp-content/plugins"]

# Applying the execution right on the folders for apache
COPY entrypoint-child.sh /usr/bin/
RUN chmod +x /usr/bin/entrypoint-child.sh
ENTRYPOINT ["entrypoint-child.sh"]
CMD ["apache2-foreground"]

# Updating the configuration of wordpress image with our own
COPY ./config/uploads.ini /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/uploads.ini

entrypoint-child.sh

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

echo "Adding permissions"
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wp-content &
find /var/www/html/wp-content -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \; &
find /var/www/html/wp-content -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \; &
echo "Permissions added"

exec docker-entrypoint.sh "$@"

Our WordPress Docker image (wordpress:latest) already contains an entry point. which is called docker-entrypoint.sh. The reason have added our custom entrypoint file into the mix is because of AWS EFS volumes for our Plugins storage on AWS. That is why we need some permissions to be added again. This entrypoint just add those permissions and then execute the image default entrypoint. Don’t worry about this for now, I will shed more light on it as we progress.

uploads.ini config

Paste the following content into config/uploads.ini file

file_uploads = On
memory_limit = 64M
upload_max_filesize = 64M
post_max_size = 64M
max_execution_time = 600

Please change the above as per your wordpress website requirements

docker-compose

Paste the following content into development/docker-compose.yml file

version: '3'
services:
  wordpress:
    build: ../
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "8000:80"
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: root
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: root
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: blog_db_name
      WORDPRESS_CONFIG_EXTRA: |
        /* If you want to add any extra wordpress config */
        # define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true );
    volumes:
      - wordpress:/var/www/html
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    restart: always
    logging:
      driver: none
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
      MYSQL_USERNAME: root
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: root
      MYSQL_DATABASE: blog_db_name
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
volumes:
  wordpress:
  db:

We have created two service in the docker-compose file

wordpress
db

WordPress service is building a Docker image from the Dockerfile we have created in the begining

build: ../

The above line is telling the docker-compose to build the image from a Dockerfile which is on the root of this project

ports:
  - "8000:80"

The above command is just mapping the 8000 port from outside world to the port 80 of this container

We are also setting some environment variables such as database credentials which are initialized in the db service

Time to see something on the browser !!!

All the required files and directories have been created. Let’s start our wordpress website by running the following commands

cd development
docker-compose build
docker-compose up

Open your web browser and type http://localhost:8000 and you should be able to see this page.

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5 thoughts on “Dockerize WordPress with themes, plugins and common configuration”

Prateek Mishra says:

May 4, 2020 at 4:55 am

Hi Salman,

I am following all the above process, but WordPress is not Launching using Docker.

Leo says:

September 11, 2020 at 2:22 am

Hi Salman thanks for the post – do I need to sepcify a volume in the yaml? Doesnt the COPY at startup remove the need for volumes?

Dan says:

December 2, 2020 at 7:36 am

This guide really helped me thank you so much.
I had issue with wp-content permission (root:root) and this article solved my problem.
Thank you.

1. salmansohail says:
  
  February 21, 2021 at 4:27 am
  
  I am glad is resolved your problem 🙂
  
Адриан says:

February 23, 2021 at 7:57 am

This is great series man! Thank you for your efforts !
A question though, you define two containers one for the app and one for db. Why do you define the db container, arent’t we looking for using the RDS(mysql) db created later in these series ?