Docker WordPress setup for local development Mar 2 2018

Development environment will use: WordPress latest - the image uses Apache MariaDB latest

I would like to keep the WordPress files in the host machine so I can tinker with them so we’ll be using a mount defined by the environment variable: WPHOME

so let’s say we have the following directory schema:

└── wordpress-development
    ├── WordPress/
    └── docker/

inside the docker directory is where the docker-compose.yml (you can see the docker-compose file at the end of the post) file is located, so the command I will run to bring the containers up will look like this for my example: $ WPHOME=../WordPress/ docker-compose up -d

Here I specifically send the variable WPHOME to point to the WordPress directory on the current parent’s directory(../WordPress/) so the WordPress code will be installed there.

For the database I want the data to be persistent but I don’t need it to be stored in the host machine so I’ll just define a volume so Docker can keep track of it, I named it wpdevmysql so when I do a docker valume ls and I see it I know what that volume represents and is easy to decide if I want to delete it or not, always try to use something descriptive so when you look back at something 6 months from now it still makes sense.

That is it, run: $ WPHOME=../WordPress/ docker-compose up -d

and now you can go to your browser and do your WordPress installation at http://localhost:8080

enjoy.

Here you can see the docker-compose.yml file (change the passwords just to build the habit of not using default passwords even in your local environment).

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

version: '3.1'

services:
   mysql:
     image: mariadb
     restart: always
     environment:
       - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=test123
     volumes:
       - wpdevmysql:/var/lib/mysql
   wordpress:
     image: wordpress
     restart: always
     ports:
       - 8080:80
     environment:
       - WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=test123
     volumes:
       - $WPHOME:/var/www/html
volumes:
  wpdevmysql: