Wordpress with Docker Compose

This page shows you how to deploy a sample WordPress site using Docker Compose.

Before you begin

Follow these instructions to install runsc with Docker. This document assumes that Docker and Docker Compose are installed and the runtime name chosen for gVisor is runsc.

Configuration

We’ll start by creating the docker-compose.yaml file to specify our services. We will specify two services, a wordpress service for the Wordpress Apache server, and a db service for MySQL. We will configure Wordpress to connect to MySQL via the db service host name.

Note: This example uses gVisor to sandbox the frontend web server, but not the MySQL database backend. In a production setup, due to the I/O overhead imposed by gVisor, it is not recommended to run your database in a sandbox. The frontend is the critical component with the largest outside attack surface, where gVisor’s security/performance trade-off makes the most sense. See the Production guide for more details.

Note: Docker Compose uses it’s own network by default and allows services to communicate using their service name. Docker Compose does this by setting up a DNS server at IP address 127.0.0.11 and configuring containers to use it via resolv.conf. This IP is not addressable inside a gVisor sandbox so it’s important that we set the DNS IP address to the alternative 8.8.8.8 and use a network that allows routing to it. See Networking in Compose for more details.

Note: The runtime field was removed from services in the 3.x version of the API in versions of docker-compose < 1.27.0. You will need to write your docker-compose.yaml file using the 2.x format or use docker-compose >= 1.27.0. See this issue for more details.

version: '2.3'

services:
   db:
     image: mysql:5.7
     volumes:
       - db_data:/var/lib/mysql
     restart: always
     environment:
       MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: somewordpress
       MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
       MYSQL_USER: wordpress
       MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress
     # All services must be on the same network to communicate.
     network_mode: "bridge"
     # Uncomment the following line if you want to sandbox the database.
     #runtime: "runsc"

   wordpress:
     depends_on:
       - db
     # When using the "bridge" network specify links.
     links:
       - db
     image: wordpress:latest
     ports:
       - "8080:80"
     restart: always
     environment:
       WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
       WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
       WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress
       WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress
     # Specify the dns address if needed.
     dns:
       - 8.8.8.8
     # All services must be on the same network to communicate.
     network_mode: "bridge"
     # Specify the runtime used by Docker. Must be set up in
     #  /etc/docker/daemon.json.
     runtime: "runsc"

volumes:
    db_data: {}

Once you have a docker-compose.yaml in the current directory you can start the containers:

docker-compose up

Once the containers have started you can access wordpress at http://localhost:8080.

Congrats! You now how a working wordpress site up and running using Docker Compose.

What’s next

Learn how to deploy WordPress with Kubernetes.

Before deploying this to production, see the Production guide for how to take full advantage of gVisor.