dneary / docker-lamp

Trying to do a basic Docker LAMP stack in docker-compose

Deploying a LAMP stack using docker-compose

This project will enable you to get started with a starter multi-container LAMP stack using docker containers. We will start 3 containers, each with a specific role:

1. nginx: We map port 80 of localhost to port 80 of the nginx container. This container will proxy for the entire application. This will enable us to modify the architecture of our application without changing how our users interact with it. For example, behind a proxy, we might load balance across multiple application servers, or add a reverse proxy cache to avoid hitting the application for static resources.
2. wordpress: This is a basic Apache2/PHP container with the latest version of Wordpress pre-installed. We add configuration options for the Wordpress container for the database connection to a separate database node. For test purposes, we map port 80 of the Wordpress container to port 8080 of the host.
3. mysql-server: This container will serve as our database. The database will be initialized with an empty database and a pre-configured user through environment variables.

Each of these containers is added to a bridge network for the application. These containers can reach each other by name (db, wordpress, and proxy), but from the host, we cannot connect to them, except via the docker command. For example, if I try to point my web browser at the wordpress container, I cannot connect to it.

Prerequisites

Throughout, we assume that you are running on a modern Linux distribution. The author uses the RHEL family of operating systems - CentOS Streams, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, but any platform-specific commands will be flagged. If you are using a Debian-family distribution, you will need to use an equivalent on those platforms.

We also assume that you have installed Docker (docker.io) and docker-compose. The instructions should work with podman and podman-compose, but we have not tested them.

We will also use git to check out the code from github.

We will want to run docker-compose as an unprivileged user, so we have to add our user to the docker group.

usermod -aG docker $USER

After running this, you need to ensure that you relaunch a login shell for the change to take effect. You can do this explicitly with:

sudo -s -u $USER

but for the change to take effect permanently in your instance, you will need to restart the sshd service. On the RHEL family, this means:

sudo systemctl restart sshd

The next time you connect to your instance with ssh, you should see docker group in the output of groups for your user.

To test that you now have Docker correctly installed and configured, run:

docker run hello-world

You should see a Docker container being downloaded from dockerhub, and a message confirming that your installation appears to be running correctly.

Getting started

Now that we have things set up, check out this project:

git clone https://github.com/dneary/docker-lamp.git
cd docker-lamp

We need a few directories to be created that do not yet exist:

mkdir -p wordpress mysql/wordpress mysql/logs mysql/initdb

We can now copy a database back-up from another Wordpress site into mysql/initdb to initialize the database when we start our stack. If you don't already have a back-up, don't worry about it, we will go through the Wordpress installation process.

We should now be ready to run:

docker-compose up -d

This will process the docker-compose.yml file in this directory, and download three containers: nginx, wordpress, and mysql-server. We start these containers as the services proxy, wordpress, and db, and they are all added to a bridge network created for the project. Since we do not (yet) have a domain name, we do not enable and configure https using SSL certificates. If all goes well, you should now be able to go to http://localhost:80 and start the Wordpress installation process.