Spinning Up an Even Older WordPress Site Using Docker Compose

Following up my last post, I realized that I wasn’t looking through the tags on Docker Hub properly, and the earliest version available as a pre-built container is actually WordPress 3.9!

I had to take a closer look at the logs and make some guesses, as it turns out the environment variable for pointing WordPress to the right database host is different, and its hard to find info on using 8 year old docker images, but I got it working:

version: "3"
services:
  wordpress:
    image: wordpress:3.9
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 80:80
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wp
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: PASSWORDGOESHERE
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress_db
      MYSQL_PORT_3306_TCP: 'mysql'
    volumes:
      - ./public_html:/var/www/html
  mysql:
    image: mysql:5.7.42
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress_db
      MYSQL_USER: wp
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: PASSWORDGOESHERE
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ANOTHERPASSWORDGOESHERE
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/mysql

Really the only difference in the compose file is the version number for WordPress and the MYSQL_PORT_3306_TCP  environment variable instead of  WORDPRESS_DB_HOST.

Success!