wordpress + sqlite quick start with docker compose

Today I have been trying out the sqlite plugin for wordpress that will reach wp Core on a near future. I did found different instructions out there, but was looking for something I could spin up and down without having to either require an existing running instance, running manual steps or trust non official images, so I ended up writing a docker compose project reference to set the whole thing up. Note the following is for local play testing purposes only.

The repo includes a db.php file (copied from the plugin db.copy file), that gets filled up during the plugin activation. Instead of doing that, it is included and already filled in. WordPress also wants a wp-config.php file present to tell it it has been configured, and the configuration steps require a database connection. I also wanted to skip this step. I also went overboard and ended up running the wordpress alpine with php-fpm image instead of the stock image starting an apache server, so it also includes an fpm.conf file containing a s[ai]mple configuration to nginx alongside.

The following steps will roughly get you there:

$ git clone https://github.com/eskerda/wp-sqlite-docker-compose
$ cd wp-sqlite-docker-compose
$ git clone https://github.com/wordpress/sqlite-database-integration
$ docker compose up -d
$ open http://localhost:8080
$ docker compose logs -f

These are the contents of the docker compose file

version: '3.8'
services:
  wordpress:
    image: wordpress:6.1.1-fpm-alpine
    volumes:
      - wordpress:/var/www/html/
      - ./wp-config.php:/var/www/html/wp-config.php
      - ./db.php:/var/www/html/wp-content/db.php
      - ./sqlite-database-integration:/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/sqlite-database-integration
      - ./wp-content:/var/www/html/wp-content
  nginx:
    image: nginx:1.7
    volumes:
      - ./fpm.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
      - wordpress:/var/www/html
    ports:
      - 8080:80
volumes:
  wordpress:

It defines a volume to hold all the wordpress files so it survives restarts, and also includes a local bind mount to wp-content for easy playing with the sqlite db. Ideally I would like to bind mount this file directly, but I was getting permission errors and didn’t really want to deal with that pain at the moment.

$ sqlite3 wp-content/database/wordpress.db
SQLite version 3.37.0 2021-12-09 01:34:53
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> .tables
wp_commentmeta         wp_postmeta            wp_termmeta
wp_comments            wp_posts               wp_terms
wp_links               wp_term_relationships  wp_usermeta
wp_options             wp_term_taxonomy       wp_users
sqlite> .schema wp_posts
CREATE TABLE wp_posts (
	ID  integer   NOT NULL  PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT ,
	post_author  integer   NOT NULL default '0',
	post_date   text NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
	post_date_gmt   text NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
	post_content  text NOT NULL,
	post_title  text NOT NULL,
	post_excerpt  text NOT NULL,
	post_status   text NOT NULL default 'publish',
	comment_status   text NOT NULL default 'open',
	ping_status   text NOT NULL default 'open',
	post_password   text NOT NULL default '',
	post_name   text NOT NULL default '',
	to_ping  text NOT NULL,
	pinged  text NOT NULL,
	post_modified   text NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
	post_modified_gmt   text NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
	post_content_filtered  text NOT NULL,
	post_parent  integer   NOT NULL default '0',
	guid   text NOT NULL default '',
	menu_order   integer NOT NULL default '0',
	post_type   text NOT NULL default 'post',
	post_mime_type   text NOT NULL default '',
	comment_count  integer NOT NULL default '0'
);
CREATE INDEX post_name ON wp_posts(post_name);
CREATE INDEX type_status_date ON wp_posts(post_type,post_status,post_date,ID);
CREATE INDEX post_parent ON wp_posts(post_parent);
CREATE INDEX post_author ON wp_posts(post_author);
sqlite>

Overall, this looks promising and will probably update this wordpress instance to something similar soon™.

As a final note, I wanted to just provide a quick docker oneliner without much of the fpm bind mount complexity I added along the way. The following just works as much:

docker run --name wp-sqlite -v $(realpath wp-config.php):/var/www/html/wp-config.php -v $(realpath db.php):/var/www/html/wp-content/db.php -v $(realpath sqlite-database-integration):/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/sqlite-database-integration -p 8080:80 wordpress