If you are here because you are still looking for a good, simple, and free way to set up a WordPress development environment, especially if you are on Apple Silicon, you are reading the right article.
Depending on your machine, there are plenty of free and almost free applications to host a PHP development environment. Unfortunately, most of them are either have a horrible interface or not well supported on Apple Silicon. The other choice is to set up each piece of PHP installation, MySQL, and a server like Apache, separately.
When I was looking for a simple way to set up WordPress for development, I was looking for something that is working, costs no money, is ad-free, and is easy to set up, also to maintain. After I found nothing that I would have liked, I started looking for Docker as a solution. Fortunately, I quickly found that WordPress has a Docker image; also, I found plenty of articles on how to set it up properly. The best of them for me at the time was a Yoast article that provided me the template for a docker-compose file, which I can use now for my development purposes.
Before you run the single command to set up everything, there is one software you need to install. That is the Docker Desktop application.
Here is the Docker Compose File created for WordPress installation using MySQL and the latest PHP, Apache, and WordPress.
# /wordpress-docker/docker-compose.yml
---
version: '3.3'
services:
db:
container_name: 'local-wordpress-db'
image: 'mysql:8.0'
volumes:
- './data/mysql:/var/lib/mysql'
ports:
- 18766:3306
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: somewordpress
MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress_db
MYSQL_USER: wordpress_user
MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress_password
wordpress:
container_name: 'local-wordpress'
depends_on:
- db
image: 'wordpress:latest'
ports:
- 80:80
environment:
WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: 'db:3306'
WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress_user
WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress_password
WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress_db
volumes:
- "./wordpress:/var/www/html"
- "./plugins:/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins"
Installation in terminal: docker-compose up -d
IDE of choice: PHPStorm (Paid)
Free IDE alternative: VS Code.
