Today we are going to be hosting a website on Raspberry Pi Using WordPress & Docker. We are also going to use NGINX Proxy Manager to make our WordPress website accessible from the Internet.

https://youtu.be/NK_pNPSRTtQ

This is episode 10 in our Raspberry Pi Series. If you have not seen our other episodes It would benefit you greatly to go through them all so you have everything installed and configured the same as our system.

If you chose to go it alone that is also fine. We will outline below what you will need to save you some time.

Difficulty=Medium

Some considerations to self-hosting a website on Raspberry Pi.

A Raspberry Pi 4 should have plenty of resources to host a small to medium website to the outside internet. With its improved RAM capacity and overall hardware improvements, it should handle basic hosting ok.

Every network and setup is different but there may be a few areas that could cause bottlenecks.

Network speed plays a big part in delivering a fast response to your website viewers. A slow connection will also struggle to serve simultaneous connections. It is very important to make sure if you are going to self-host a WordPress website that your Internet speed is up to par.

Installing your Raspberry Pi OS on an SD Card is not the best idea for this setup. Instead Installing your Raspberry Pi OS on an SSD or USB Flash drive would be much faster at serving web pages. It will also be more reliable as an SD card is prone to data write limitations and could corrupt at any time. (A ticking time bomb?).

Prerequisites:

You will need to have followed our previous episodes in our Raspberry Pi Series but if you just want to follow this guide we will give an overview of what you should already have:

• A Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi OS installed. We recommend using an SSD for WordPress hosting.
• Secured Raspberry Pi.
• A Duckdns account. Or if you want to use your own Domain – A Domain name and a Cloudflare account. A Domain linked to Cloudflare. If you have a Dynamic IP address then both Duckdns & Cloudflare services need a DDNS container installed in Docker and configured correctly to communicate with your online accounts.
• A CNAME subdomain set up in Cloudflare for your Nextcloud service that is resolving correctly and has “DNS only” set in Proxy status.
• Openmediavault, Docker and Portainer Installed.
• Nginx Proxy Manager Docker installed and configured to accept incoming connections.
• A volume created in Openmediavault to be used for Nextcloud storage (Appdata folder).
• NGINX Proxy Manager Docker container installed with port 80 and 443 on your Router forwarded.
• Good Internet Connection

Hosting a website on Raspberry Pi 4

Lets get started.

Step 1 – Create a Cloudflare Domain/Subdomain

Navigate to your Cloudflare and log in with your account details.

Click on your “domain name” and then on the “DNS” tab.

If you want to use your main Domain name you can add this to NGINX Proxy Manager but in our example we are going to create a subdomain to point to our WordPress container.

Click on “Add record“.

Under “Type” select “CNAME”

Under “Name” type “wordpress“.

Under “Target” type “@“.

Under “Proxy status” select the icon so it goes grey and says “DNS only“.

Click “Save“.

Step 2 – Create WordPress data folders using Openmediavault 5.

Log into your Openmediavault interface and go to “Shared Folders“.

Confirm you have a shared folder added to store your docker containers. You can name this folder anything you like. In our example, we call the folder “Appdata“. If you would like to know how to create this folder we have covered this in our previous Raspberry Pi series episode.

Step 3 – Create A Stack & Deploy WordPress Containers in Portainer.

Go to your Portainer interface and log in. Click on “Stacks” then “Add Stack“

Name your Stack “wordpress” and copy and paste the following docker-composed data into the “Web editor” field

version: '2.1'

services:

  wordpress:
    image: wordpress
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8383:80
    environment:
      PUID: 1000
      PGID: 100
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: changeme
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress
    volumes:
      - /PATH TO FOLDER/wordpress:/var/www/html

    links:
      - db:db

  db:
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/mariadb
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=100
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=changeme
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=wordpress
      - MYSQL_USER=wordpress
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=changeme #Must match the above password
    volumes:
      - /PATH TO FOLDER/Wordpressdb:/config
    ports:
      - 3333:3306
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  wordpress:
  db:

Edit the fields to match your requirements. Be sure to change the PUID and GUID to match your pi user account, as well as folder locations.

Also, change the “changeme” password fields to something more secure.

Note: Make sure the user names and passwords match in both parts of the stack.

Once you have set all the required fields with your values you can navigate to the bottom of the stack page and click on “Deploy the stack“.

Click on Containers to confirm that two new containers have been added once for WordPress Application files and the other for the WordPress MariaDB database.

Click on the log icon to check both container logs to make sure they are all running ok. You should see the following in wordpress_db (Mariadb).

Also your WordPress docker logs should look similar to this.

If your logs look similar to ours then you are good to move on to the next Step.

Step 4 – Creating WordPress Proxy Host entry in NGINX Proxy Manager.

Navigate to your NGINX Proxy Manager interface. Click on “Proxy Hosts“.

Then click on “Add Proxy Host“.

Add your domain or subdomain to “Domain Names“.

Add your Pi IP address to “Forward Hostname/IP”

Add your WordPress port to “Forward Port“.

Click “Block Common Exploits”

Your “New Proxy Host” should look like this.

Click on the “SSL” tab.

Under “SSL Certificate” click “Request a new SSL Certificate“.

Then make sure “Force SSL” , “HTTP/2 Support” and “I Agree to the Let’s Encrypt Terms of Service” are green ticked and click “Save“.

Due to a bug in NGINX Proxy Manager, you will need to click the hamburger menu and check the “SSL” settings were saved correctly. If not re-tick the same buttons and then “Save” again.

Step 5 – Installing WordPress.

You can now use your fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to access your WordPress installation page. You should also see that you have successfully added a TLS/SSL certificate to your website.

Select your language and click “Continue“.

Add a “Site Title“, “Username“, “Password”, “Confirm Password“, “Your Email“, and tick the “Search engine visibility” checkbox.

Notice: Use secure unique username and passwords.

Click on “Install WordPress“. This may take a little while to complete.

Once the installation process has completed you should be taken to the Administrator log in page.

Enter your “Username” and “Password” and press “Log In“

You should now have a working WordPress website.

Step 6 – Finalizing Cloudflare settings.

You will now need to do two final things in Cloudflare to complete the domain setup.

Navigate to Cloudflare and log in using your account details.

When in the Clouldflare dashboard click on the “DNS” tab.

Go to your domain or subdomain name and click on “DNS only” under “Proxy status“. Make sure that you change the grey cloud logo to an orange color and that the status says “Proxied“.

Once done click “Save“.

Troubleshooting any problems

The final thing to do and it is to prevent a redirection loop from happening when trying to access your WordPress website. If you ever see the following you will need to make this extra change in Cloudflare.

In Cloudflare click on “SSL/TLS” tab.

In this section change your SSL/TLS encryption mode from “Flexible” to “Full“. It should auto-save the settings.

You can now visit your website and you should be able to access it as normal.

Well done you did it.

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