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.

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

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
rm -rf .git Dockerfile run.sh README.md CHANGELOG.md ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md

# start the website at localhost:8080
docker-compose up

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.

This repository does 2 things:

1. Include the files to create a wordpress Docker image (visiblevc/wordpress)
2. Include build tools to develop wordpress themes (gulp)

If you don't plan to build the Docker image yourself, you shouldn't care for 1. We publish the image on Docker Hub and you can grab it directly from there. That's why you can safely remove the Dockerfile and run.sh.

The reason we remove .git, README.md and CHANGELOG.md is because we assume you will start your own repository, named after your project. There is virtually no benefit keeping ties with our remote git repository.

Available Images

PHP Version	Tags
7.0	latest latest-php7.0 <version>-php7.0
5.6	latest-php5.6 <version>-php5.6

If you need a specific version, look at the Changelog

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
• Part 4: Auto deploy your site on your server (coming)

Example

The only thing you need to get started is a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '2'
services:
  wordpress:
    image: visiblevc/wordpress:latest
    ports:
      - 8080:80
      - 443:443
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data # Required if importing an existing database
      - ./tweaks.ini:/usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/tweaks.ini # Optional tweaks to the php.ini config
      - ./wp-content/uploads:/app/wp-content/uploads
      - ./yourplugin:/app/wp-content/plugins/yourplugin # Plugin development
      - ./yourtheme:/app/wp-content/themes/yourtheme   # Theme development
    environment:
      DB_HOST: db
      DB_NAME: wordpress
      DB_PASS: root # must match below
      PLUGINS: >-
        academic-bloggers-toolkit,
        co-authors-plus,
        [WP-API]https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API/archive/master.zip,
        [local]my-local-plugin
      THEMES: >-
        [local]my-local-theme
      SEARCH_REPLACE: yoursite.com,localhost:8080
      WP_DEBUG: 'true'
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7 # or mariadb:10
    volumes:
      - data:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
volumes:
  data: {}

Need PHPMyAdmin? Add it as a service

version: '2'
services:
  wordpress:
    # same as above
  db:
    # same as above
  phpmyadmin:
    image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
    ports:
      - 22222:80
volumes:
  data:

Default Database Credentials

Credential	Value	Notes
Hostname	db	Can be changed with the DB_HOST environment variable
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

Service Environment Variables

Notes:

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

wordpress

Variable	Default Value	Description
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
ADMIN_EMAIL	admin@${DB_NAME}.com	Administrator email address
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		Comma-separated list of themes you want to install in either of the following forms theme-slug: Used when installing theme direct from WordPress.org [theme-slug]https://themesite.com/theme.zip: Used when installing theme from URL [local]theme-slug: Used when you have the theme downloaded to a local folder that you have volumed to the ./wp-content/themes directory.
PLUGINS		Comma-separated list of plugins you want to install in either of the following forms: plugin-slug: Used when installing plugin direct from WordPress.org. [plugin-slug]http://pluginsite.com/plugin.zip: Used when installing plugin from URL. [local]plugin-slug: Used when you have the plugin downloaded to a local folder that you have volumed to the ./wp-content/plugins directory.
MULTISITE	'false'	Set to 'true' to enable multisite
PERMALINKS	/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/	A valid WordPress permalink structure tag
SEARCH_REPLACE		Comma-separated string in the form of current-url,replacement-url When defined, current-url will be replaced with replacement-url on build (useful for development environments utilizing a database copied from a live site) Note: If you are running Docker using Docker Machine, your replacement url MUST be the output of the following command: echo $(docker-machine ip <your-machine-name>):8080
VERBOSE	'false'	Set to 'true' to run build with verbose logging

db

Variable	Default Value	Description
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD✅		Must match DB_PASS of the wordpress service

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 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:

npm run wp db export /data --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 SEARCH_REPLACE: example.com,localhost:8080 environment variable in the docker-compose.yml.

Using in Production

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

$ docker-compose ps
Name                   Command                        State
---------------------------------------------------------
project_db_1           docker-entrypoint.sh mysqld     Up
project_wordpress_1    docker-php-entrypoint /run.sh   Up

$ docker exec -it project_wordpress_1  /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 exec -it project_wordpress_1  /bin/bash
root@4e16c7fe4a10:/app# certbot renew

Contributing

You can find Development instructions in the Wiki.