Install WordPress for Plugin Development

For plugin development we need a local installation of Wordpress. There are multiple ways to do this, however our preferred choice is to go with Docker; probably, the most elegant way to run Wordpress locally.

If you are new to Docker, then we suggest you to get familiarize with it as docker or similar technologies is the modern way of doing things in cloud platforms; it is not that difficult. Running Wordpress with Docker is breeze, just couple of commands and you get it up and running as everything is pre-configured.

Still, you like to do things in old fashion, then you may install Wordpress using XAMPP.

Install Docker Components

We need Docker and Docker Compose to run Wordpress and MySQL containers. Refer Install Docker Engine and Install Docker Compose and choose appropriate platform such as Windows, Linux or Mac.

After installation, test it by running following commands,

docker run hello-world
docker-compose -version

Run WordPress

We are ready to run and install WordPress. First download docker-compose.yml file from our project page and copy it some work folder where you want to develop on your plugin; any location is fine. This folder will be used by Docker to place Wordpress and database data files. Run following command from the work folder,

docker-compose up

Docker will download Wordpress and MySQL images from Docker Hub and create and run two containers. This process may take couple of minutes as the download size is about 600MB. Wait for image download to complete and then check status of containers with

$ docker ps

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE              STATUS         PORTS                               NAMES
5978b42efabc   wordpress:latest   Up 3 minutes   0.0.0.0:8000->80/tcp                wp
08c08ebc263f   mysql:5.7          Up 3 minutes   0.0.0.0:3306->3306/tcp, 33060/tcp   wp-db

With containers up and running, open http://localhost:8000 in the browser to get WordPress Installation screen. Complete the WordPress installation.

Once WP Installation is complete, you will have following folders in your work directory.

m@m:mywp$ ls -lrt
total 12
-rwxrwxr-x 1 m                m         693 Mar  9 16:56 docker-compose.yml
drwxr-xr-x 7 systemd-coredump root     4096 Mar 14 17:10 db
drwxr-xr-x 5 www-data         www-data 4096 Mar 14 17:10 wp

Docker places wordpress files in wp folder and database files in db. Here onwards, we refer wp as the wordpress directory. We are going to place the our plugin folder in wp/wp-content/plugins dir in the next tutorial.

Volume Path in Windows

Windows users may have to adjust, in docker-compose.yml, volume path or use long format to define the volumes . Refer Stack Overflow and Compose Volume Reference for details.

In the next tutorial, we start with WordPress plugin basics by start coding a simple plugin.