Tag: docker

This is the third post in a series about moving my WordPress blog into the cloud using Docker.

Blog Post Series

At this point we have a bunch of docker images, but no docker containers running. We will fix that in this post. We will look at docker-compose and how it orchestrates bringing up all of our docker containers. Then we will look at some administrative tasks in docker. This includes backing up the site and keeping logs.

Bringing up Docker containers with docker-compose

Docker-compose is a tool from Docker that allows us to define how each container will fit in our application. It makes for a single command to get everything up and running. Docker-compose should already be installed on our target machine by Ansible. First thing we will do is look at our docker-compose.yml which configures everything. Continue reading “How to link Docker containers together”

Blog Post Series

We now have a good foundation to build our WordPress site off of. Docker is installed and ready. We will quickly cover why Docker, some best practices, and finally the actual how of our Docker containers. Much like the previous post, this is not designed to be an introduction to Docker. There are literally thousands of intro to Docker articles and by the time I publish this that number will have doubled. Sign up to any tech newsletter and you will easily see five “Intro to Docker” articles every week. If you want an introduction, go to the official Docker site and you there is an interactive tutorial.

I would also like to point out that if you have followed along or forked my Github repo, you will have a Vagrant machine that has Docker on it by running:

$ vagrant up
$ ansible-playbook -i ./.vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory ../ansible/docker.yml

You can then run vagrant ssh and have a completely disposable Docker virtual machine.

Why Docker

The most honest answer I can give to this is that I needed to upgrade my Linux server. I was running Ubuntu 12.04 which is three years old and one LTS release behind. The server was working and I did not want to setup a new one. I had been using Ansible, so I knew I was going to use that. In fact in the beginning I was just going to create an Ansible playbook to install my WordPress stack. I, of course, had heard about Docker and wanted to build something with it. After reading about Docker I decided it would be the most extensible option.

We will discover why in this post. Docker allows us to easily rethink and rebuild our stack from the ground up. Want Apache instead of nginx? Swap it. New version of nginx? Swap it. MariaDB instead of MySQL? You get the idea. This would be very difficult to do without provisioning a brand new server. We also will have a test site that we can run locally that is almost *literally* the exact same as production.

The CORRECT way to use Docker

There are some strong opinions on how a Docker container should be built. I am in the “As few processes as needed, ideally one process” camp. Doing this comes with difficulties and I will list out the issues and what we can do about the issues. Continue reading “WordPress and Docker the correct way”