Introduction
WordPress is a free and open-source Content Management System (CMS) built on a MySQL database with PHP processing. Thanks to its extensible plugin architecture and templating system, and the fact that most of its administration can be done through the web interface, WordPress is a popular choice when creating different types of websites, from blogs to product pages to eCommerce sites.
Running WordPress typically involves installing a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and PHP) stack, which can be time-consuming. However, by using tools like Docker and Docker Compose, you can simplify the process of setting up your preferred stack and installing WordPress. Instead of installing individual components by hand, you can use images, which standardize things like libraries, configuration files, and environment variables, and run these images in containers, isolated processes that run on a shared operating system. Additionally, by using Compose, you can coordinate multiple containers — for example, an application and database — to communicate with one another.
In this tutorial, you will build a multi-container WordPress installation. Your containers will include a MySQL database, an Nginx web server, and WordPress itself. You will also secure your installation by obtaining TLS/SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt for the domain you want associated with your site. Finally, you will set up a cron
job to renew your certificates so that your domain remains secure.
Prerequisites
To follow this tutorial, you will need:
- A server running Ubuntu 18.04, along with a non-root user with
sudo
privileges and an active firewall. For guidance on how to set these up, please see this Initial Server Setup guide. - Docker installed on your server, following Steps 1 and 2 of How To Install and Use Docker on Ubuntu 18.04.
- Docker Compose installed on your server, following Step 1 of How To Install Docker Compose on Ubuntu 18.04.
- A registered domain name. This tutorial will use example.com throughout. You can get one for free at Freenom, or use the domain registrar of your choice.
-
Both of the following DNS records set up for your server. You can follow this introduction to DigitalOcean DNS for details on how to add them to a DigitalOcean account, if that’s what you’re using:
- An A record with
example.com
pointing to your server’s public IP address. - An A record with
www.example.com
pointing to your server’s public IP address.
Step 1 — Defining the Web Server Configuration
Before running any containers, our first step will be to define the configuration for our Nginx web server. Our configuration file will include some WordPress-specific location blocks, along with a location block to direct Let’s Encrypt verification requests to the Certbot client for automated certificate renewals.
First, create a project directory for your WordPress setup called wordpress
and navigate to it:
- mkdir wordpress && cd wordpress
Next, make a directory for the configuration file:
- mkdir nginx-conf
Open the file with nano
or your favorite editor:
- nano nginx-conf/nginx.conf
In this file, we will add a server block with directives for our server name and document root, and location blocks to direct the Certbot client’s request for certificates, PHP processing, and static asset requests.
Paste the following code into the file. Be sure to replace example.com
with your own domain name:
server { listen 80; listen [::]:80;
server_name <span class="highlight">example.com</span> www.<span class="highlight">example.com</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> index <span class="highlight">index.php</span> index.html index.htm<span class="token punctuation">;</span> root /var/www/html<span class="token punctuation">;</span> location ~ /.well-known/acme-challenge <span class="token punctuation">{</span> allow all<span class="token punctuation">;</span> root /var/www/html<span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> location / <span class="token punctuation">{</span> try_files <span class="token variable">$uri</span> <span class="token variable">$uri</span>/ /index.php<span class="token variable">$is_args</span><span class="token variable">$args</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> location ~ <span class="token punctuation">\</span>.php$ <span class="token punctuation">{</span> try_files <span class="token variable">$uri</span> <span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token number">404</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> fastcgi_split_path_info ^<span class="token punctuation">(</span>.+<span class="token punctuation">\</span>.php<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>/.+<span class="token punctuation">)</span>$<span class="token punctuation">;</span> fastcgi_pass <span class="highlight">wordpress</span>:9000<span class="token punctuation">;</span> fastcgi_index index.php<span class="token punctuation">;</span> include fastcgi_params<span class="token punctuation">;</span> fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME <span class="token variable">$document_root</span><span class="token variable">$fastcgi_script_name</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> fastcgi_param PATH_INFO <span class="token variable">$fastcgi_path_info</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> location ~ /<span class="token punctuation">\</span>.ht <span class="token punctuation">{</span> deny all<span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> location <span class="token operator">=</span> /favicon.ico <span class="token punctuation">{</span> log_not_found off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> access_log off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> location <span class="token operator">=</span> /robots.txt <span class="token punctuation">{</span> log_not_found off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> access_log off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> allow all<span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> location ~* <span class="token punctuation">\</span>.<span class="token punctuation">(</span>css<span class="token operator">|</span>gif<span class="token operator">|</span>ico<span class="token operator">|</span>jpeg<span class="token operator">|</span>jpg<span class="token operator">|</span>js<span class="token operator">|</span>png<span class="token punctuation">)</span>$ <span class="token punctuation">{</span> expires max<span class="token punctuation">;</span> log_not_found off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span>
}
CopyOur server block includes the following information:
Directives:
-
listen
: This tells Nginx to listen on port80
, which will allow us to use Certbot’s webroot plugin for our certificate requests. Note that we are not including port443
yet — we will update our configuration to include SSL once we have successfully obtained our certificates. -
server_name
: This defines your server name and the server block that should be used for requests to your server. Be sure to replaceexample.com
in this line with your own domain name. -
index
: Theindex
directive defines the files that will be used as indexes when processing requests to your server. We’ve modified the default order of priority here, movingindex.php
in front ofindex.html
so that Nginx prioritizes files calledindex.php
when possible. -
root
: Ourroot
directive names the root directory for requests to our server. This directory,/var/www/html
, is created as a mount point at build time by instructions in our WordPress Dockerfile. These Dockerfile instructions also ensure that the files from the WordPress release are mounted to this volume.
Location Blocks:
-
location ~ /.well-known/acme-challenge
: This location block will handle requests to the.well-known
directory, where Certbot will place a temporary file to validate that the DNS for our domain resolves to our server. With this configuration in place, we will be able to use Certbot’s webroot plugin to obtain certificates for our domain. -
location /
: In this location block, we’ll use atry_files
directive to check for files that match individual URI requests. Instead of returning a 404Not Found
status as a default, however, we’ll pass control to WordPress’sindex.php
file with the request arguments. -
location ~ \.php$
: This location block will handle PHP processing and proxy these requests to ourwordpress
container. Because our WordPress Docker image will be based on thephp:fpm
image, we will also include configuration options that are specific to the FastCGI protocol in this block. Nginx requires an independent PHP processor for PHP requests: in our case, these requests will be handled by thephp-fpm
processor that’s included with thephp:fpm
image. Additionally, this location block includes FastCGI-specific directives, variables, and options that will proxy requests to the WordPress application running in ourwordpress
container, set the preferred index for the parsed request URI, and parse URI requests. -
location ~ /\.ht
: This block will handle.htaccess
files since Nginx won’t serve them. Thedeny_all
directive ensures that.htaccess
files will never be served to users. -
location = /favicon.ico
,location = /robots.txt
: These blocks ensure that requests to/favicon.ico
and/robots.txt
will not be logged. -
location ~* \.(css|gif|ico|jpeg|jpg|js|png)$
: This block turns off logging for static asset requests and ensures that these assets are highly cacheable, as they are typically expensive to serve.
For more information about FastCGI proxying, see Understanding and Implementing FastCGI Proxying in Nginx. For information about server and location blocks, see Understanding Nginx Server and Location Block Selection Algorithms.
Save and close the file when you are finished editing. If you used nano
, do so by pressing CTRL+X
, Y
, then ENTER
.
With your Nginx configuration in place, you can move on to creating environment variables to pass to your application and database containers at runtime.
Step 2 — Defining Environment Variables
Your database and WordPress application containers will need access to certain environment variables at runtime in order for your application data to persist and be accessible to your application. These variables include both sensitive and non-sensitive information: sensitive values for your MySQL root password and application database user and password, and non-sensitive information for your application database name and host.
Rather than setting all of these values in our Docker Compose file — the main file that contains information about how our containers will run — we can set the sensitive values in an .env
file and restrict its circulation. This will prevent these values from copying over to our project repositories and being exposed publicly.
In your main project directory, ~/wordpress
, open a file called .env
:
- nano .env
The confidential values that we will set in this file include a password for our MySQL root user, and a username and password that WordPress will use to access the database.
Add the following variable names and values to the file. Remember to supply your own values here for each variable:
~/wordpress/.envMYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=your_root_password
MYSQL_USER=your_wordpress_database_user
MYSQL_PASSWORD=your_wordpress_database_password
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We have included a password for the root administrative account, as well as our preferred username and password for our application database.
Save and close the file when you are finished editing.
Because your .env
file contains sensitive information, you will want to ensure that it is included in your project’s .gitignore
and .dockerignore
files, which tell Git and Docker what files not to copy to your Git repositories and Docker images, respectively.
If you plan to work with Git for version control, initialize your current working directory as a repository with git init
:
- git init
Then open a .gitignore
file:
- nano .gitignore
Add .env
to the file:
.env
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Save and close the file when you are finished editing.
Likewise, it’s a good precaution to add .env
to a .dockerignore
file, so that it doesn’t end up on your containers when you are using this directory as your build context.
Open the file:
- nano .dockerignore
Add .env
to the file:
.env
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Below this, you can optionally add files and directories associated with your application’s development:
~/wordpress/.dockerignore.env
.git
docker-compose.yml
.dockerignore
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Save and close the file when you are finished.
With your sensitive information in place, you can now move on to defining your services in a docker-compose.yml
file.
Step 3 — Defining Services with Docker Compose
Your docker-compose.yml
file will contain the service definitions for your setup. A service in Compose is a running container, and service definitions specify information about how each container will run.
Using Compose, you can define different services in order to run multi-container applications, since Compose allows you to link these services together with shared networks and volumes. This will be helpful for our current setup since we will create different containers for our database, WordPress application, and web server. We will also create a container to run the Certbot client in order to obtain certificates for our webserver.
To begin, open the docker-compose.yml
file:
- nano docker-compose.yml
Add the following code to define your Compose file version and db
database service:
version: '3'
services:
db:
image: mysql:8.0
container_name: db
restart: unless-stopped
env_file: .env
environment:
- MYSQL_DATABASE=wordpress
volumes:
- dbdata:/var/lib/mysql
command: ‘–default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password’
networks:
- app-network
The db
service definition contains the following options:
-
image
: This tells Compose what image to pull to create the container. We are pinning themysql:8.0
image here to avoid future conflicts as themysql:latest
image continues to be updated. For more information about version pinning and avoiding dependency conflicts, see the Docker documentation on Dockerfile best practices. -
container_name
: This specifies a name for the container. -
restart
: This defines the container restart policy. The default isno
, but we have set the container to restart unless it is stopped manually. -
env_file
: This option tells Compose that we would like to add environment variables from a file called.env
, located in our build context. In this case, the build context is our current directory. -
environment
: This option allows you to add additional environment variables, beyond those defined in your.env
file. We will set theMYSQL_DATABASE
variable equal towordpress
to provide a name for our application database. Because this is non-sensitive information, we can include it directly in thedocker-compose.yml
file. -
volumes
: Here, we’re mounting a named volume calleddbdata
to the/var/lib/mysql
directory on the container. This is the standard data directory for MySQL on most distributions. -
command
: This option specifies a command to override the default CMD instruction for the image. In our case, we will add an option to the Docker image’s standardmysqld
command, which starts the MySQL server on the container. This option,--default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password
, sets the--default-authentication-plugin
system variable tomysql_native_password
, specifying which authentication mechanism should govern new authentication requests to the server. Since PHP and therefore our WordPress image won’t support MySQL’s newer authentication default, we must make this adjustment in order to authenticate our application database user. -
networks
: This specifies that our application service will join theapp-network
network, which we will define at the bottom of the file.
Next, below your db
service definition, add the definition for your wordpress
application service:
...
wordpress:
depends_on:
- db
image: wordpress:5.1.1-fpm-alpine
container_name: wordpress
restart: unless-stopped
env_file: .env
environment:
- WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=db:3306
- WORDPRESS_DB_USER=$MYSQL_USER
- WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=$MYSQL_PASSWORD
- WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=wordpress
volumes:
- wordpress:/var/www/html
networks:
- app-network
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In this service definition, we are naming our container and defining a restart policy, as we did with the db
service. We’re also adding some options specific to this container:
-
depends_on
: This option ensures that our containers will start in order of dependency, with thewordpress
container starting after thedb
container. Our WordPress application relies on the existence of our application database and user, so expressing this order of dependency will enable our application to start properly. -
image
: For this setup, we are using the5.1.1-fpm-alpine
WordPress image. As discussed in Step 1, using this image ensures that our application will have thephp-fpm
processor that Nginx requires to handle PHP processing. This is also analpine
image, derived from the Alpine Linux project, which will help keep our overall image size down. For more information about the benefits and drawbacks of usingalpine
images and whether or not this makes sense for your application, see the full discussion under the Image Variants section of the Docker Hub WordPress image page. -
env_file
: Again, we specify that we want to pull values from our.env
file, since this is where we defined our application database user and password. -
environment
: Here, we’re using the values we defined in our.env
file, but we’re assigning them to the variable names that the WordPress image expects:WORDPRESS_DB_USER
andWORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD
. We’re also defining aWORDPRESS_DB_HOST
, which will be the MySQL server running on thedb
container that’s accessible on MySQL’s default port,3306
. OurWORDPRESS_DB_NAME
will be the same value we specified in the MySQL service definition for ourMYSQL_DATABASE
:wordpress
. -
volumes
: We are mounting a named volume calledwordpress
to the/var/www/html
mountpoint created by the WordPress image. Using a named volume in this way will allow us to share our application code with other containers. -
networks
: We’re also adding thewordpress
container to theapp-network
network.
Next, below the wordpress
application service definition, add the following definition for your webserver
Nginx service:
...
webserver:
depends_on:
- wordpress
image: nginx:1.15.12-alpine
container_name: webserver
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- "80:80"
volumes:
- wordpress:/var/www/html
- ./nginx-conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
networks:
- app-network
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Again, we’re naming our container and making it dependent on the wordpress
container in order of starting. We’re also using an alpine
image — the 1.15.12-alpine
Nginx image.
This service definition also includes the following options:
-
ports
: This exposes port80
to enable the configuration options we defined in ournginx.conf
file in Step 1. -
volumes
: Here, we are defining a combination of named volumes and bind mounts:
-
wordpress:/var/www/html
: This will mount our WordPress application code to the/var/www/html
directory, the directory we set as theroot
in our Nginx server block. -
./nginx-conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d
: This will bind mount the Nginx configuration directory on the host to the relevant directory on the container, ensuring that any changes we make to files on the host will be reflected in the container. -
certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
: This will mount the relevant Let’s Encrypt certificates and keys for our domain to the appropriate directory on the container.
And again, we’ve added this container to the app-network
network.
Finally, below your webserver
definition, add your last service definition for the certbot
service. Be sure to replace the email address and domain names listed here with your own information:
certbot:
depends_on:
- webserver
image: certbot/certbot
container_name: certbot
volumes:
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
- wordpress:/var/www/html
command: certonly --webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/html --email sammy@example.com --agree-tos --no-eff-email --staging -d example.com -d www.example.com
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This definition tells Compose to pull the certbot/certbot
image from Docker Hub. It also uses named volumes to share resources with the Nginx container, including the domain certificates and key in certbot-etc
and the application code in wordpress
.
Again, we’ve used depends_on
to specify that the certbot
container should be started once the webserver
service is running.
We’ve also included a command
option that specifies a subcommand to run with the container’s default certbot
command. The certonly
subcommand will obtain a certificate with the following options:
-
--webroot
: This tells Certbot to use the webroot plugin to place files in the webroot folder for authentication. This plugin depends on the HTTP-01 validation method, which uses an HTTP request to prove that Certbot can access resources from a server that responds to a given domain name. -
--webroot-path
: This specifies the path of the webroot directory. -
--email
: Your preferred email for registration and recovery. -
--agree-tos
: This specifies that you agree to ACME’s Subscriber Agreement. -
--no-eff-email
: This tells Certbot that you do not wish to share your email with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Feel free to omit this if you would prefer. -
--staging
: This tells Certbot that you would like to use Let’s Encrypt’s staging environment to obtain test certificates. Using this option allows you to test your configuration options and avoid possible domain request limits. For more information about these limits, please see Let’s Encrypt’s rate limits documentation. -
-d
: This allows you to specify domain names you would like to apply to your request. In this case, we’ve includedexample.com
andwww.example.com
. Be sure to replace these with your own domain.
Below the certbot
service definition, add your network and volume definitions:
...
volumes:
certbot-etc:
wordpress:
dbdata:
networks:
app-network:
driver: bridge
Our top-level volumes
key defines the volumes certbot-etc
, wordpress
, and dbdata
. When Docker creates volumes, the contents of the volume are stored in a directory on the host filesystem, /var/lib/docker/volumes/
, that’s managed by Docker. The contents of each volume then get mounted from this directory to any container that uses the volume. In this way, it’s possible to share code and data between containers.
The user-defined bridge network app-network
enables communication between our containers since they are on the same Docker daemon host. This streamlines traffic and communication within the application, as it opens all ports between containers on the same bridge network without exposing any ports to the outside world. Thus, our db
, wordpress
, and webserver
containers can communicate with each other, and we only need to expose port 80
for front-end access to the application.
The finished docker-compose.yml
file will look like this:
version: '3'
services:
db:
image: mysql:8.0
container_name: db
restart: unless-stopped
env_file: .env
environment:
- MYSQL_DATABASE=wordpress
volumes:
- dbdata:/var/lib/mysql
command: ‘–default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password’
networks:
- app-network
wordpress:
depends_on:
- db
image: wordpress:5.1.1-fpm-alpine
container_name: wordpress
restart: unless-stopped
env_file: .env
environment:
- WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=db:3306
- WORDPRESS_DB_USER=
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image: nginx:1.15.12-alpine
container_name: webserver
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- “80:80”
volumes:
- wordpress:/var/www/html
- ./nginx-conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
networks:
- app-network
certbot:
depends_on:
- webserver
image: certbot/certbot
container_name: certbot
volumes:
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
- wordpress:/var/www/html
command: certonly --webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/html --email sammy@example.com --agree-tos --no-eff-email --staging -d example.com -d www.example.com
volumes:
certbot-etc:
wordpress:
dbdata:
networks:
app-network:
driver: bridge
Save and close the file when you are finished editing.
With your service definitions in place, you are ready to start the containers and test your certificate requests.
Step 4 — Obtaining SSL Certificates and Credentials
We can start our containers with the docker-compose up
command, which will create and run our containers in the order we have specified. If our domain requests are successful, we will see the correct exit status in our output and the right certificates mounted in the /etc/letsencrypt/live
folder on the webserver
container.
Create the containers with docker-compose up
and the -d
flag, which will run the db
, wordpress
, and webserver
containers in the background:
- docker-compose up -d
You will see output confirming that your services have been created:
Output
Creating db ... done
Creating wordpress ... done
Creating webserver ... done
Creating certbot ... done
Using docker-compose ps
, check the status of your services:
- docker-compose ps
If everything was successful, your db
, wordpress
, and webserver
services will be Up
and the certbot
container will have exited with a 0
status message:
Output
Name Command State Ports
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
certbot certbot certonly --webroot ... Exit 0
db docker-entrypoint.sh --def ... Up 3306/tcp, 33060/tcp
webserver nginx -g daemon off; Up 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp
wordpress docker-entrypoint.sh php-fpm Up 9000/tcp
If you see anything other than Up
in the State
column for the db
, wordpress
, or webserver
services, or an exit status other than 0
for the certbot
container, be sure to check the service logs with the docker-compose logs
command:
- docker-compose logs service_name
You can now check that your certificates have been mounted to the webserver
container with docker-compose exec
:
- docker-compose exec webserver ls -la /etc/letsencrypt/live
If your certificate requests were successful, you will see output like this:
Output
total 16
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 May 10 15:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 May 10 15:45 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 740 May 10 15:45 README
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 10 15:45 example.com
Now that you know your request will be successful, you can edit the certbot
service definition to remove the --staging
flag.
Open docker-compose.yml
:
- nano docker-compose.yml
Find the section of the file with the certbot
service definition, and replace the --staging
flag in the command
option with the --force-renewal
flag, which will tell Certbot that you want to request a new certificate with the same domains as an existing certificate. The certbot
service definition will now look like this:
...
certbot:
depends_on:
- webserver
image: certbot/certbot
container_name: certbot
volumes:
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
- certbot-var:/var/lib/letsencrypt
- wordpress:/var/www/html
command: certonly --webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/html --email sammy@example.com --agree-tos --no-eff-email --force-renewal -d example.com -d www.example.com
...
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You can now run docker-compose up
to recreate the certbot
container. We will also include the --no-deps
option to tell Compose that it can skip starting the webserver
service, since it is already running:
- docker-compose up --force-recreate --no-deps certbot
You will see output indicating that your certificate request was successful:
Output
Recreating certbot ... done
Attaching to certbot
certbot | Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
certbot | Plugins selected: Authenticator webroot, Installer None
certbot | Renewing an existing certificate
certbot | Performing the following challenges:
certbot | http-01 challenge for example.com
certbot | http-01 challenge for www.example.com
certbot | Using the webroot path /var/www/html for all unmatched domains.
certbot | Waiting for verification...
certbot | Cleaning up challenges
certbot | IMPORTANT NOTES:
certbot | - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
certbot | /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
certbot | Your key file has been saved at:
certbot | /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
certbot | Your cert will expire on 2019-08-08. To obtain a new or tweaked
certbot | version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot
certbot | again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
certbot | "certbot renew"
certbot | - Your account credentials have been saved in your Certbot
certbot | configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a
certbot | secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
certbot | also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Certbot so
certbot | making regular backups of this folder is ideal.
certbot | - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:
certbot |
certbot | Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate
certbot | Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le
certbot |
certbot exited with code 0
With your certificates in place, you can move on to modifying your Nginx configuration to include SSL.
Step 5 — Modifying the Web Server Configuration and Service Definition
Enabling SSL in our Nginx configuration will involve adding an HTTP redirect to HTTPS, specifying our SSL certificate and key locations, and adding security parameters and headers.
Since you are going to recreate the webserver
service to include these additions, you can stop it now:
- docker-compose stop webserver
Before we modify the configuration file itself, let’s first get the recommended Nginx security parameters from Certbot using curl
:
- curl -sSLo nginx-conf/options-ssl-nginx.conf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/certbot/certbot/master/certbot-nginx/certbot_nginx/_internal/tls_configs/options-ssl-nginx.conf
This command will save these parameters in a file called options-ssl-nginx.conf
, located in the nginx-conf
directory.
Next, remove the Nginx configuration file you created earlier:
- rm nginx-conf/nginx.conf
Open another version of the file:
- nano nginx-conf/nginx.conf
Add the following code to the file to redirect HTTP to HTTPS and to add SSL credentials, protocols, and security headers. Remember to replace example.com
with your own domain:
server { listen 80; listen [::]:80;
server_name <span class="highlight">example.com</span> www.<span class="highlight">example.com</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> location ~ /.well-known/acme-challenge <span class="token punctuation">{</span> allow all<span class="token punctuation">;</span> root /var/www/html<span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> location / <span class="token punctuation">{</span> rewrite ^ https://<span class="token variable">$host</span><span class="token variable">$request_uri</span>? permanent<span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span>
}
server {
listen 443 ssl http2;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
index index.php index.html index.htm<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
root /var/www/html<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
server_tokens off<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<span class="highlight">example.com</span>/fullchain.pem<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<span class="highlight">example.com</span>/privkey.pem<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/options-ssl-nginx.conf<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
add_header X-Frame-Options <span class="token string">"SAMEORIGIN"</span> always<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
add_header X-XSS-Protection <span class="token string">"1; mode=block"</span> always<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
add_header X-Content-Type-Options <span class="token string">"nosniff"</span> always<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
add_header Referrer-Policy <span class="token string">"no-referrer-when-downgrade"</span> always<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
add_header Content-Security-Policy <span class="token string">"default-src * data: 'unsafe-eval' 'unsafe-inline'"</span> always<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token comment"># add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload" always;</span>
<span class="token comment"># enable strict transport security only if you understand the implications</span>
location / <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
try_files <span class="token variable">$uri</span> <span class="token variable">$uri</span>/ /index.php<span class="token variable">$is_args</span><span class="token variable">$args</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>
location ~ <span class="token punctuation">\</span>.php$ <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
try_files <span class="token variable">$uri</span> <span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token number">404</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
fastcgi_split_path_info ^<span class="token punctuation">(</span>.+<span class="token punctuation">\</span>.php<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>/.+<span class="token punctuation">)</span>$<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
fastcgi_pass <span class="highlight">wordpress</span>:9000<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
fastcgi_index index.php<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
include fastcgi_params<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME <span class="token variable">$document_root</span><span class="token variable">$fastcgi_script_name</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO <span class="token variable">$fastcgi_path_info</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>
location ~ /<span class="token punctuation">\</span>.ht <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
deny all<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>
location <span class="token operator">=</span> /favicon.ico <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
log_not_found off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> access_log off<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>
location <span class="token operator">=</span> /robots.txt <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
log_not_found off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> access_log off<span class="token punctuation">;</span> allow all<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>
location ~* <span class="token punctuation">\</span>.<span class="token punctuation">(</span>css<span class="token operator">|</span>gif<span class="token operator">|</span>ico<span class="token operator">|</span>jpeg<span class="token operator">|</span>jpg<span class="token operator">|</span>js<span class="token operator">|</span>png<span class="token punctuation">)</span>$ <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
expires max<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
log_not_found off<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>
}
CopyThe HTTP server block specifies the webroot for Certbot renewal requests to the .well-known/acme-challenge
directory. It also includes a rewrite directive that directs HTTP requests to the root directory to HTTPS.
The HTTPS server block enables ssl
and http2
. To read more about how HTTP/2 iterates on HTTP protocols and the benefits it can have for website performance, please see the introduction to How To Set Up Nginx with HTTP/2 Support on Ubuntu 18.04.
This block also includes our SSL certificate and key locations, along with the recommended Certbot security parameters that we saved to nginx-conf/options-ssl-nginx.conf
.
Additionally, we’ve included some security headers that will enable us to get A ratings on things like the SSL Labs and Security Headers server test sites. These headers include X-Frame-Options
, X-Content-Type-Options
, Referrer Policy
, Content-Security-Policy
, and X-XSS-Protection
. The HTTP Strict Transport Security
(HSTS) header is commented out — enable this only if you understand the implications and have assessed its “preload” functionality.
Our root
and index
directives are also located in this block, as are the rest of the WordPress-specific location blocks discussed in Step 1.
Once you have finished editing, save and close the file.
Before recreating the webserver
service, you will need to add a 443
port mapping to your webserver
service definition.
Open your docker-compose.yml
file:
- nano docker-compose.yml
In the webserver
service definition, add the following port mapping:
...
webserver:
depends_on:
- wordpress
image: nginx:1.15.12-alpine
container_name: webserver
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- "80:80"
- "443:443"
volumes:
- wordpress:/var/www/html
- ./nginx-conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
networks:
- app-network
Copy
The docker-compose.yml
file will look like this when finished:
version: '3'
services:
db:
image: mysql:8.0
container_name: db
restart: unless-stopped
env_file: .env
environment:
- MYSQL_DATABASE=wordpress
volumes:
- dbdata:/var/lib/mysql
command: ‘–default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password’
networks:
- app-network
wordpress:
depends_on:
- db
image: wordpress:5.1.1-fpm-alpine
container_name: wordpress
restart: unless-stopped
env_file: .env
environment:
- WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=db:3306
- WORDPRESS_DB_USER=
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MYSQL_USER</span> - <span class="token assign-left variable">WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD</span><span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token variable">
MYSQLUSER</span>−<spanclass="tokenassign−leftvariable">WORDPRESSDBPASSWORD</span><spanclass="tokenoperator">=</span><spanclass="tokenvariable">MYSQL_PASSWORD
- WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=wordpress
volumes:
- wordpress:/var/www/html
networks:
- app-network
webserver:
depends_on:
- wordpress
image: nginx:1.15.12-alpine
container_name: webserver
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- “80:80”
- “443:443”
volumes:
- wordpress:/var/www/html
- ./nginx-conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
networks:
- app-network
certbot:
depends_on:
- webserver
image: certbot/certbot
container_name: certbot
volumes:
- certbot-etc:/etc/letsencrypt
- wordpress:/var/www/html
command: certonly --webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/html --email sammy@example.com --agree-tos --no-eff-email --force-renewal -d example.com -d www.example.com
volumes:
certbot-etc:
wordpress:
dbdata:
networks:
app-network:
driver: bridge
Save and close the file when you are finished editing.
Recreate the webserver
service:
- docker-compose up -d --force-recreate --no-deps webserver
Check your services with docker-compose ps
:
- docker-compose ps
You should see output indicating that your db
, wordpress
, and webserver
services are running:
Output
Name Command State Ports
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
certbot certbot certonly --webroot ... Exit 0
db docker-entrypoint.sh --def ... Up 3306/tcp, 33060/tcp
webserver nginx -g daemon off; Up 0.0.0.0:443->443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp
wordpress docker-entrypoint.sh php-fpm Up 9000/tcp
With your containers running, you can now complete your WordPress installation through the web interface.
Step 6 — Completing the Installation Through the Web Interface
With our containers running, we can finish the installation through the WordPress web interface.
In your web browser, navigate to your server’s domain. Remember to substitute example.com
here with your own domain name:
https://example.com
Select the language you would like to use:
After clicking Continue, you will land on the main setup page, where you will need to pick a name for your site and a username. It’s a good idea to choose a memorable username here (rather than “admin”) and a strong password. You can use the password that WordPress generates automatically or create your own.
Finally, you will need to enter your email address and decide whether or not you want to discourage search engines from indexing your site:
Clicking on Install WordPress at the bottom of the page will take you to a login prompt:
Once logged in, you will have access to the WordPress administration dashboard:
With your WordPress installation complete, you can now take steps to ensure that your SSL certificates will renew automatically.
Step 7 — Renewing Certificates
Let’s Encrypt certificates are valid for 90 days, so you will want to set up an automated renewal process to ensure that they do not lapse. One way to do this is to create a job with the cron
scheduling utility. In this case, we will create a cron
job to periodically run a script that will renew our certificates and reload our Nginx configuration.
First, open a script called ssl_renew.sh
:
- nano ssl_renew.sh
Add the following code to the script to renew your certificates and reload your web server configuration. Remember to replace the example username here with your own non-root username:
~/wordpress/ssl_renew.sh#!/bin/bash
COMPOSE="/usr/local/bin/docker-compose --no-ansi"
DOCKER="/usr/bin/docker"
cd /home/sammy/wordpress/
KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '&' at position 73: …oken operator">&̲amp;&</span…COMPOSE kill -s SIGHUP webserver
$DOCKER system prune -af
This script first assigns the docker-compose
binary to a variable called COMPOSE
, and specifies the --no-ansi
option, which will run docker-compose
commands without ANSI control characters. It then does the same with the docker
binary. Finally, it changes to the ~/wordpress
project directory and runs the following docker-compose
commands:
-
docker-compose run
: This will start acertbot
container and override thecommand
provided in ourcertbot
service definition. Instead of using thecertonly
subcommand, we’re using therenew
subcommand here, which will renew certificates that are close to expiring. We’ve included the--dry-run
option here to test our script. -
docker-compose kill
: This will send aSIGHUP
signal to thewebserver
container to reload the Nginx configuration. For more information on using this process to reload your Nginx configuration, please see this Docker blog post on deploying the official Nginx image with Docker.
It then runs docker system prune
to remove all unused containers and images.
Close the file when you are finished editing. Make it executable:
- chmod +x ssl_renew.sh
Next, open your root crontab
file to run the renewal script at a specified interval:
- sudo crontab -e
If this is your first time editing this file, you will be asked to choose an editor:
Output
no crontab for root - using an empty one
Select an editor. To change later, run ‘select-editor’.
- /bin/nano <---- easiest
- /usr/bin/vim.basic
- /usr/bin/vim.tiny
- /bin/ed
Choose 1-4 [1]:
…
At the bottom of the file, add the following line:
crontab...
*/5 * * * * /home/sammy/wordpress/ssl_renew.sh >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1
Copy
This will set the job interval to every five minutes, so you can test whether or not your renewal request has worked as intended. We have also created a log file, cron.log
, to record relevant output from the job.
After five minutes, check cron.log
to see whether or not the renewal request has succeeded:
- tail -f /var/log/cron.log
You should see output confirming a successful renewal:
Output
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
** DRY RUN: simulating 'certbot renew' close to cert expiry
** (The test certificates below have not been saved.)
Congratulations, all renewals succeeded. The following certs have been renewed:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem (success)
** DRY RUN: simulating ‘certbot renew’ close to cert expiry
** (The test certificates above have not been saved.)
You can now modify the crontab
file to set a daily interval. To run the script every day at noon, for example, you would modify the last line of the file to look like this:
...
0 12 * * * /home/sammy/wordpress/ssl_renew.sh >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1
Copy
You will also want to remove the --dry-run
option from your ssl_renew.sh
script:
#!/bin/bash
COMPOSE="/usr/local/bin/docker-compose --no-ansi"
DOCKER="/usr/bin/docker"
cd /home/sammy/wordpress/
KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '&' at position 63: …oken operator">&̲amp;&</span…COMPOSE kill -s SIGHUP webserver
$DOCKER system prune -af
Your cron
job will ensure that your Let’s Encrypt certificates don’t lapse by renewing them when they are eligible. You can also set up log rotation with the Logrotate utility to rotate and compress your log files.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you used Docker Compose to create a WordPress installation with an Nginx web server. As part of this workflow, you obtained TLS/SSL certificates for the domain you want associated with your WordPress site. Additionally, you created a cron
job to renew these certificates when necessary.
As additional steps to improve site performance and redundancy, you can consult the following articles on delivering and backing up WordPress assets:
- How to Speed Up WordPress Asset Delivery Using DigitalOcean Spaces CDN.
- How To Back Up a WordPress Site to Spaces.
- How To Store WordPress Assets on DigitalOcean Spaces.
If you are interested in exploring a containerized workflow with Kubernetes, you can also check out: