Maybe a week ago, I decided to refresh my Linode instance. I'd been using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on it the past 10 years. 16.04 has been unsupported for quite a while now, but I was being lazy while still watching the server for possible compromises (the server was locked down very well).
Initially, I'd planned on a slow rollover to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, by deploying a new host and slowly migrating over to it from the old server. One day, I just said, "fuck it" and started from scratch. I kept my old disk volume and mounted it to the new host so that I could grab old data whenever I needed it...having config files from the old host would help me when reinstalling the software I was using on the old host.
The plan was to migrate my two Wordpress sites to the new host but today I tried running Wordpress on Docker on an old Dell XPS 8930 and it worked well. I first tried to just get to the point where Wordpress could install onto it. I then tried to restore a backup of one Wordpress site onto the Dockerized Wordpress instance and I was immediately successful. It happened so quickly that I spent the rest of the day testing it, to the point that I decided to do the same thing on the 24.04 server tonight. It's now up and running and I've already been posting to it. I'll monitor it the next few days and will probably back it up, tear down the whole thing, and then try some different setups, such as trying to run both Wordpress sites from one set of containers (the problem is, I need both Wordpress sites to be serving on port 80 and there's only one port 80 on the server.
Currently the setup is using three small containers (one for MySQL, one for Wordpress, and one for phpmyadmin). I leveraged the YAML files of two other nerds, using both to build my own YAML file, which I used to pull the images and configure the containers. I ran in to issues more than a few times, but between what I learned last year on acloud.guru and trial and error, it wasn't all that difficult. What I haven't done (YET) is build my own dockerfiles.
I usually also use the Linode host as a file server (sharing pictures with friends and forums), and I was doing that using Apache, so that's a 3rd application that I'd need to use port 80...not sure how I'm going to set all this up, but the neat thing about Docker is that I can blow it away and start over (keeping my .yml compose files to work with and tweak), again and again, until I get it right.
This was the first time outside of training that I used Docker and I honestly should've been using it a long time ago.
I actually had a lot of fun doing this.
UPDATE (7/28/2024):
I'm having some issues trying to determine how to host two sites on one Dockerized Wordpress setup. I can probably use the muti-site Wordpress setup but I need to study up on how to alter the wp-config file using the docker-compose.yml file.
Or, I can probably just run two Docker setups, one for my firearms blog and one for my car blog.
I also want to be able to share my many pictures and files using Apache, but found that I can't run Apache AND Worpdress, as both use port 80. I may have to use some type of proxying.
Lastly, I can just reinstalled Wordpress in a non-Dockerized fashion, while experimenting with Wordpress in Docker. This is probably the more reasonable approach, as I can study up how to leverage Docker at my own leisure but have a production native Wordpress setup.
