I was trying to install WordPress on sample data on LocalHost, but having error while connecting it to FTP, I have heard its easier to install WordPress on WordPress optimized hosting because that is managed and optimized, should I stay on shared hosting or moved to managed hosting?
There’s nothing really anyone can offer for optimized wordpress hosting guessing thats some kind of sales gimick, I would advise you to find a host running php 7.2 as opposed to 5.6 which many are running.
Shared hosting for wordpress is usually fine, i’d look for a provider that offers cpanel hosting, wordpress is pretty much a couple clicks to install from cpanel which will make it easy for yourself.
Can even run cpanel yourself if you really wanted to go down that route. There’s plenty of cpanel hosting providers around though.
If you need to migrate from one host to another host, once wordpress is up and running you can use the all-in-one-wp-migration plugin to backup the site and restore to the other host.
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I’m stuck… I installed Wordpress with defaults and it worked fine but when I customize the Data locations to specific Datasets… I don’t know what groups/users need what kinds of permissions for TrueNAS ACL. Where can I find documentation on this? I tried looking on TrueNAS doc and community and also on Wordpress side and could use someone to point me in the right direction.
I don’t run Wordpress in a docker container. So take my input with a grain of salt. I prefer to run it in a VM as that makes backups so much easier to do. That being said the /var/www/html directory (i.e., the main wordpress directory/volume) needs to be owned by user “www-data”, which in my system is UID 33. The /var/lib/mysql (i.e., the database directory -I am using MariaDB) needs to be owned by user 999, which I think in TrueNAS shows up as “Netdata”. I have also found that with some database containers, if you are connecting to TrueNAS over NFS, you may need to go into the advanced settings for the share and map rootuser to root
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Thanks for sharing. I haven’t gotten much response on TrueNAS or Wordpress forums and discord… have been grasping at straws all alone.
Yeah, I am not sure the Wordpress forums would be much help. My guess is >90% of Wordpress users pay someone else to host their sites. I am surprised about the TrueNAS forums though.
I will say, I really don’t care for the way TrueNAS runs docker containers in general. I stopped using the apps page and started using docker compose so I could get containers set up the way I want.
BTW, if you want to stand up wordpress using Portainer stacks or Docker compose, copy the contents below to create an appropriate YAML file. Change the paths to the left of colon to reflect where on your TrueNAS the data should reside (path to your data sets). I used the permissions outlined above and this works fine
services:
WordPress:
depends_on:
- db
- redis
image: wordpress:latest
container_name: wordpress
restart: always
ports:
- 8090:80
environment:
WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db
WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wp_user
WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: secret_password
WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wp_database
volumes:
- /mnt/fast_pool/Wordpress/html:/var/www/html
db:
image: mariadb:latest
container_name: wp-mariadb
restart: always
environment:
MYSQL_DATABASE: wp_database
MYSQL_USER: wp_user
MYSQL_PASSWORD: secret_password
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: somewordpress
volumes:
- /mnt/fast_pool/Wordpress/database:/var/lib/mysql
redis:
image: redis:alpine
container_name: wp-redis
restart: always
volumes:
- /mnt/fast_pool/Wordpress/Redis:/data
phpmyadmin:
depends_on:
- db
image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
container_name: wp-phpma
restart: always
ports:
- 8091:80
environment:
PMA_HOST: db
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: somewordpress
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Thanks again. The admin portal is running now… so I can start to migrate/rebuild my website from Wix. Will have to learn how themes are build and wordpress stage and release process works.
btw: how did you know what groups need what permissions? I’m trying to learn where I could have help myself.
A lot of trial and error. I first ran Wordpress in VM following a tutorial from Jay LaCroix over at LearnLinuxTV. He covers some of the permissions errors. I also ran into a lot of roadblocks trying to learn how to use containers/docker, and did a lot of googling.
Migration will be easiest if you use a plug in for it. I have had success with the Updraft Plus backup/restore plugin. The alternative is to google how to do a manual back up and migration, which involves a lot of command line work. Not terribly hard though if you are comfortable with the command line.
Staging and release process? I don’t really use one. I just use Proxmox, as it makes it so easy to snapshot a VM (and back up a VM). I make my changes and if I make a mistake I just roll it back. I don’t use a real software development lifecycle for my little hobby websites. If you really want a robust staging and release process, you should probably be running Wordpress in Kubernetes. Then you could do rolling uppdates.
As far as themes, I use Elementor as my page builder and use pre-configured themes.
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You have been so helpful. Thank you so so much. So glad you ran across my post and helped.
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I was happy to help. It would be great to hear how you are progressing in the future.
For what its worth, your next challenge will be change the max upload size. There are some changes you will need to make to your docker stack to make it happen
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@Louie1961 Would love your guidance on these 2 items if you are comfortable helping:
-
my main site will be on the www subdomain (marketing). but I plan to have other sites on at other subdomains (that are really not related)… cars and ones for my kids etc… So they will have different looks (layouts, fonts, colours etc.) Can I build themes for each subdomain or do I create separate instances of wordpress for each subdomain as they are essentially separate sites. Seemed like merging can cause issues with plugins etc.
-
Connecting the TrueNAS to the internet. As I understand it, I install the Cloudflare app on TruNAS to create a tunnel to TrueNAS from my domain name. so when I hit www.mydomain.com it say go to this IP (my IP at the time from my ISP… which changes over time). But how does it know to send that traffic to wordpress and if I have multiple wordpress’s which one? I’m missing some understanding here. Does this use Webport to differentiate? btw: I have 2 routers between the internet and my TrueNAS.
Happy to help as much as I can.
- I have never played with the multisite feature of Wordpress (e.g., running multiple sites from one instance). I know it is possible but really have no idea how to do it. For my small hobby sites, I run independent Wordpress instances. To me that’s the easiest and if I bring one site down with a mistake, I don’t bring the others down
- There isn’t one correct answer to the question. The way I do it, is I have the NGINX proxy manager (NPM) running in docker. That gives my websites SSL certificates and translates the containers to domain names. You only need one cloudflare tunnel, it can handle several (not sure of the limit) domains on their end in the configuration screen. I also use pfSense as my firewall and DNS resolver. I’ll use my Nextcloud instance as an example. This will point you in the right direction, but you will likely need to googe some of the details
a. You can use any reverse proxy, I just find NPM the easiest. All of the docker containers you want to expose need to be on a common docker network with your proxy
b. In NPM I have proxy host entries for nextcloud.mydomain.com and collabora.mydomain.com
c. I have SSL certs for each domain, obtained by using the DNS challenge in NPM. I use cloudflare as my domain registrar and as the DNS for all my domains.
d. I set up a cloudflare tunnel and run that in docker. It does not need to be on the NPM common network
e. I have my local DNS resolver set up to point requests for nextcloud.mydomain.com and collabora.mydomain.cloud to the IP address of my docker host running NPM
f. In my cloudflare control pannel under zero trust/networks, I can configure the tunnel and add public hostnames. I add one each for nextcloud.mydomain.com and collabora.mydomain.cloud
Because I have the same domain names internally and externally and because the cloudflare connector is “smart”, if I am inside my home network, traffic to my websites never leaves my internal network. Cloudflare routes it direct to the docker host. If I am outside my network it still works and uses the tunnel to find its way in and connects to my docker host. The reverse proxy works on domain names. So nextcloud.mydomain.com requests get forwarded to the nextcloud container. And so on.
You could avoid using a reverse proxy but then it is very hard to get certificates inside of your network. But you could just point the public hostname setting in cloudflare to the IP of your docker host and the correct port number for the service you want. Just be sure to remember the port numbers you assign to each service (8080, 8081, 8082).
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