Docker, specifically Docker compose, has served me well in keeping a sane development environment for my WordPress projects. MAMP was too much of a black box, and having a local PHP and SQL for both MediaWiki and WordPress was going to be more maintenance than I would have time for. With compose I have little to no maintenance burden, and my system is squeaky clean.

The following docker-compose.yml file starts two services — using the mysql, and the wordpress images:

version: '3.3'
services:
   db:
     image: mysql:5.7
     volumes:
       - ./dbdata:/var/lib/mysql
     restart: always
     environment:
       MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: somewordpress
       MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
       MYSQL_USER: wordpress
       MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress
   wordpress:
     depends_on:
       - db
     image: wordpress:latest
     ports:
       - "8008:80"
     volumes:
       - ./wp-content:/var/www/html/wp-content
     restart: always
     environment:
       WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
       WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
       WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress

The way this is setup is that both the services share a part of their file system with the host. The mysql one shares all the database data, making it easier for me to move test data around different instances and configurations of WordPress that I might be running. And, to be able to work on plugins and themes the wordpress service shares the wp-content directory. This way, I can easily clone and work on anything directly on my local system.

With this, all I need to do now to setup a new WordPress install is — create a new directory, copy this YAML file into it, and run docker-compose up. I change the wordpress service’s port mapping when I need to run multiple instances at once. That’s it!