Inception

A system administration project setting up a multi-container Docker infrastructure with Nginx, WordPress, and MariaDB from scratch.

2022-04-01

devopsOpen GitHub

Inception

A multi-container Docker setup for hosting WordPress, built entirely from scratch. No pre-built application images from Docker Hub, every Dockerfile is written by hand. The goal was to understand how a real hosting stack fits together at the container level.

Architecture

           +----------------------------------------+
           |            Docker Network              |
           |                                        |
:443  -->  |  [NGINX]  -->  [WordPress + PHP-FPM]   |
           |                        |               |
           |                   [MariaDB]            |
           +----------------------------------------+
                    |                    |
              [Volume: wp]         [Volume: db]

Container	What it does
NGINX	TLS termination, reverse proxy to PHP-FPM
WordPress	PHP-FPM app server
MariaDB	Database

Services

NGINX only listens on port 443 (HTTPS). TLS is configured with a self-signed cert using TLSv1.2/1.3. PHP requests go to WordPress via FastCGI on port 9000.

WordPress is installed and configured at startup through wp-cli. PHP-FPM handles requests instead of Apache. The admin and a regular user are both created automatically from environment variables.

MariaDB has its own named volume so data survives restarts. It's not reachable outside the Docker network.

Rules this follows

All images built from Debian or Alpine base images
Containers restart automatically on failure
No hardcoded credentials in any Dockerfile
One process per container

Running it

make        # build and start everything
make down   # stop containers
make clean  # remove containers, images, volumes
make re     # full rebuild

SCREENSHOTS // 01 FRAMES

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