Installing WordPress and MySQL in Docker

This short guide is aimed at developers who want to quickly set up a WordPress development environment using Docker. It assumes you have Docker installed on your machine. If you don’t, you can download it from the official website.

The steps we will need to follow are just three:

1. Creating required Docker Compose files
2. Running the Docker Compose command
3. Setting up WordPress

Creating required Docker Compose files#

This Gist is a template for the docker-compose.yml file. It contains the WordPress and MySQL services, and also phpMyAdmin for database management. You can copy and paste it into a new file named docker-compose.yml.

version: "4.0"

services:
  # MySQL Database
  database:
    image: mysql:latest
    volumes:
      - database_data:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: password
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
      MYSQL_USER: wordpress
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress
    networks:
      - wordpress_network

  # phpMyAdmin
  phpmyadmin:
    depends_on:
      - database
    image: phpmyadmin:latest
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "8081:80"
    environment:
      PMA_HOST: database
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: password
    networks:
      - wordpress_network

  # WordPress
  wordpress:
    depends_on:
      - database
    image: wordpress:latest
    ports:
      - "8000:80"
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./wordpress:/var/www/html
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: database:3306
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress
    networks:
      - wordpress_network

networks:
  wordpress_network:

volumes:
  database_data:

Running the Docker Compose command#

With a terminal open in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file, run the following command:

docker-compose up -d

This command will download the required images and start the containers. The -d flag is used to run the containers in the background.

Setting up WordPress#

Now that the containers are running, you can access WordPress by visiting http://localhost:8000 in your browser. You will be prompted to set up the site. The database connection details are passed through environment variables, so you don’t need to worry about them.

P.S.: A huge thank goes to Brad Traversy who setted up the composer script that I updated in this guide.