Recently I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to make plugins and themes for WordPress. To make this process easier, I’ve created a repository with everything needed to spin up a new instance of WordPress with a lot of good stuff along with it.

To make this process easier, I’ve created a repository with everything needed to spin up a new instance of WordPress with a lot of good stuff along with it. The setup is meant to be used in combination with the Remote – Containers extension for Visual Studio Code.

Here’s a summary of what you’ll get if you use the setup:

A Docker container running the latest WordPress version exposed at http://localhost:8000

A Docker container running phpMyAdmin at http://localhost:8080

PHP code linting and formatting based on the WordPress Coding Standards.

Preinstalled Node so that you can use the npx @wordpress/…

Xdebug automatically configured and ready to be used.

WP-CLI for managing your WordPress installation from the command line.

The extensions needed in VS Code to make Xdebug and linting/formatting work.

Clone this repository to a local folder and make sure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed.

Make sure you have the Visual Studio Code Remote – Containers extension installed.

Open the command palette and run the command Remote-Containers: Open Folder in Container

Select the folder with repository you just cloned.

Thats it! You should now have a database server and WordPress running in separate containers. PHP linting and formatting adhering to the WordPress Coding Standard should just work. You can also run the default debug configuration in VS Code using Xdebug.

Visit your WordPress site at http://localhost:8000.

The container has been configured to not run Xdebug when using PHP from the command line. This is to prevent it from being used when PHP-Sniffer is triggered, since it will drastically slow down the linter and the formatter.

Launch the debug configuration Listen for XDebug

In the «Ports» pane in «Remote Explorer», enable forwarding of port 9000 (click the refresh arrow to make it appear)

Note: When you stop the debugging session, make sure to disable forwarding of port 9000, or else the page will appear to hang.

If you’re developing a plugin or a theme and you have that project locally on your computer, just add them as volumes in the docker-compose.yml file below the wp_root volume, like this:

volumes:
  - wp_root:/var/www/html
  - /opt/dev/awesome-plugin:/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/awesome-plugin

..assuming you have the plugin in the local folder /opt/dev/awesome-plugin.

Feel free to contribute by opening a PR on Github. Here’s the repository:

https://github.com/kimgrytoyr/wordpress-docker

WordPress Docker

This is something I don’t do that often, and I always forget the correct syntax. Thus this post.

Let’s say you have a table images and a table users. Now you want to delete all rows in table images that are associated with rows in the table users that are marked as deleted.

First, I usually do a visual inspection of the rows that will be deleted:

SELECT i.* FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

The rows returned by this query are the rows that will be deleted when you run the following query:

DELETE i FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

They key part here is to specify which table you want to delete from. In this case it’s the table i, which is the images table.

Deleting rows with a LEFT JOIN in MySQL

Disabling the password needed for sudo for a specific user is very easy in Ubuntu. This method applies to Ubuntu 16.04, but probably also other versions of Ubuntu and maybe even other distros.

Note: If this is the first time you’re running this command, you’ll most likely be presented with a list of editors to choose from. Choose the one you’re most comfortable with.

Then enter the following line at the end of the file:

Make sure to replace user with the username of the user you want to allow using sudo without entering a password.

Disabling password for sudo in Ubuntu

The Royal Norwegian Air Force practices formation flying every year in December. This year, they were schedule to fly over Bodø at 11:22 on December 8th. I managed to capture them with my zoom lens just a couple minutes after their scheduled arrival.

It wasn't the greatest light for photographing moving aircrafts, but I managed to get a couple of photos that turned out somewhat okay.

RNoAF Christmas Star 2022

I relatively recently posted about moving my website to WordPress. This actually still holds true, but I’ve given the website a new look and made some changes to the deployment routines.

Now I have a solid development focused foundation based on Trellis.

My website is my playground. This is where I can freely play with any new technologies that I come across and just have some fun. It’s important to me that some of the things I do on the computer is just for fun, and not only work related – there’s quite a lot of that.

My previous WordPress setup was just a Digital Ocean droplet created using their One-Click WordPress installation. This works fine if you just want a website up and running where you can add a theme and your favorite plugins and start typing. But it gets a bit trickier when you want to have a local development version of the site on your computer and a production version, and even maybe a staging version, running live on the internet.

This is where Trellis comes into play. It’s a ready-to-use setup based on Bedrock and Ansible and lots of other good stuff that makes it really simple to get up and running with three different environments:

The workflow for setting up a new site once you have Trellis installed is something along the lines of:

Do some small adjustments to a couple of configuration files for the hosts (servers) and the various environments

Create a git repository of your project and push it to ie. Github

And voilà! Your site is now deployed to the staging server. Of course, you must have set up a server somewhere to use as a staging server. The same goes for the production environment.

In addition to this, I use the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin(s) so that I can easily migrate my database and media files from one environment to another.

Website changes – again

I'm Kim, a full-stack web developer and entrepreneur based in Bodø, Norway. Currently occupied with running my own company, being a father and raising a little standard poodle.

Full-stack web developer, business owner and tech geek.

WordPress Docker

Usage

Debugging with Xdebug

Adding plugins and themes