Dockerize Wordpress Stacks for Easy Migration

Assalamualaikum,

After using Google Cloud free credit for 3 months, its time to migrate our Wordpress website!

I have launched https://4nutz.tk an e-commerce website that sells our own home-brand Natural Nut Butters!

To save money, development was done on Google Cloud Compute Engine, after 3 months running, putting all the contents there! Tracking our own sales, finally its time to migrate.

At the beginning, i don't want to put so much effort in running it up, used Bitnami image to run the Wordpress. Everything was easy and breezy!

But aware of the time limit, yes we need to migrate eventually. Because the Google Cloud pricing is too expensive for me! $20 per month? kidding me.

Running the website on Digital Ocean is much cheaper $5 per month! Register using my referral link ya! you will get free $100 credit for 2 months! gets your hands dirty and start running you own web app / projects~

Ive been a fan of DO since the beginning, the price offer is very attractive, documentation support are extensive, dashboard is stunning, no down time experienced so far.

Now its time to take a step more, by dockerizing the Wordpress and its dependents stacks. As migration is really a pain to setup all the environments! Having this configurations set up life will be easier later if I again want to change platform, or move around or replicate or whatever!

for the dockerizing steps i followed this full guide.

Issue encountered:

1. Nginx 404 Permission issue on accessing Wordpress Docker container web content:

When try to accessing the the Wordpress site, the Nginx running in the docker container unable to access the Wordpress container contents. thus i tried to map the Wordpress content to host machine path too and update the user id for www-data and update the permission for the content path!. And it works! thanks to this article!

Quoted the article as below :

In the WordPress container, the directory /var/www/html is owned by the user www-data. The uid of this user in the container is 82. It is not the same in Ubuntu — the host machine. The below commands delete any existing user with the user name www-data and creates a new user with uid 82.

     $ sudo userdel www-data
     $ sudo useradd -u 82 www-data

Now, set the owner of the directory /data/html in the host machine.

      $ sudo mkdir -p /data/html
      $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /data/html

2. Error on accessing wp-admin & data not added when add to cart:

Saw the following error,

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/html/wp-content/themes/storefront-child/functions.php:

it happened probably due to the file copies that i did from Google Cloud to DO is corrupted or changed. I just need to edit the functions.php files and remove the extra lines and space ended in the file.

Restoring Wordpress & DB backups

Previously I have shared how to create backups and restore backups for Wordpress & DB, have a look on my tutorial!

I restored the Wordpress files to <docker_project_folder>/data/html folder, copied over the files and force recreate on Wordpress container.

For DB i copied over the SQL dump file to <docker_project_folder>/data/mysql and access the container to run the restore command. it can be done outside container too~ google hehe.

Notice that i linked the container volume to host paths for both Wordpress and MySQL

Push the changes to remote repository

This time I am going push the files to remote repository. Its time to be more systematic~

For Docker repo, the files that I am pushing over is

<docker_project_folder>/docker-compose.yml

<docker_project_folder>/nginx-conf/*

For Wordpress repo, there will be two repo, themes and plugins, as i havent write any custom plugin yet, i will be only focusing on theme repo

Pushing the changes of custom theme to remote repo~

OK that's all for these 2-3days exploring, improving, maintenance job!

Coding Codex

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