Develop a local WordPress theme using Docker

A while ago, we learned how easy it could be to set up WordPress using Docker. However, this setup didn't allow for customization.

So let's have a look at how we could develop our WordPress theme using Docker.

The file structure

As we could see before, all we needed was a docker-compose.yml file.

In our new setup, we want to include a themes folder without specific themes.

In the example case, we have one theme called fooserama.

Custom WordPress theme

Note: This will overwrite all themes, so you will lose any themes you already loaded in WordPress (including the default ones)

Next up, we have to change our docker-compose.yml file to reflect this data.

The first part we want to change is the volume part for the WordPress image. Before, this was set up like so:

wordpress:
    volumes:
      - wordpress_data:/var/www/html

And then in the volumes section, we had this:

volumes:
  db_data: {}
  wordpress_data: {}

What we want is to change the volumes for the WordPress image like so:

wordpress:
    volumes:
      - ./themes:/var/www/html/wp-content/themes

And we want to remove this link for the volumes so it will look like this:

volumes:
  db_data: {}

If we reboot out the Docker image, we should have our custom theme available on the WordPress website.

docker-compose up -d

Custom WordPress theme loaded in Docker

This same approach could be used to handle plugins or even uploads if you wanted to.

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