WordPress

Wordpress is a self-hosted content management web application, especially designed for blogging but also a good start to create your own website. It can customized with themes and an in-build site editor and further extended with plugins.

Installation

Note: Parts of this instruction and module are not yet upstreamed and still being reviewed as an open PR.

A simple local setup of Wordpress can be enabled with the following setup

services.wordpress.sites."localhost" = {
  enable = true;
  virtualHost.adminAddr = "hello@example.org";
};

Visit http://localhost to setup your new Wordpress instance. By default, a Mysql server is configured automatically so you won't have to setup the database backend.

Configuration

Language

The default language of the Wordpress module will be English. It is possible to package additional languages and make them available for your specific instance. Using extraConfig you can configure the default language. In this example, we're going to package and enable the German language.

{ pkgs, ... }: let

  language-de = pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
    name = "language-de";
    src = pkgs.fetchurl {
      url = "https://de.wordpress.org/wordpress-6.0.1-de_DE.tar.gz";
      sha256 = "sha256-dlas0rXTSV4JAl8f/UyMbig57yURRYRhTMtJwF9g8h0=";
    };
    installPhase = "mkdir -p $out; cp -r ./wp-content/languages/* $out/";
  };

in {

  services.wordpress.sites."localhost" = {
    enable = true;
    languages = [ language-de ];
    virtualHost.adminAddr = "hello@example.org";
    extraConfig = ''
      define ('WPLANG', 'de_DE');
    '';
  };

}

Make sure that the source of your language package corresponds to the Wordpress package version you're using. Consult the translation portal of Wordpress for the specific country and language codes available. This example is using the code de_DE (Germany/German) in the source URL and also the extraConfig part.

Plugins and themes

In case you want to package and add custom plugins and themes, you can add these too

let

# For shits and giggles, let's package the responsive theme
responsive = pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "responsive";
  # Download the theme from the wordpress site
  src = pkgs.fetchurl {
    url = http://wordpress.org/themes/download/responsive.1.9.7.6.zip;
    sha256 = "06i26xlc5kdnx903b1gfvnysx49fb4kh4pixn89qii3a30fgd8r8";
  };
  # We need unzip to build this package
  buildInputs = [ pkgs.unzip ];
  # Installing simply means copying all files to the output directory
  installPhase = "mkdir -p $out; cp -R * $out/";
};

# Wordpress plugin 'akismet' installation example
akismet = pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "akismet";
  # Download the theme from the wordpress site
  src = pkgs.fetchurl {
    url = https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/akismet.3.1.zip;
    sha256 = "1i4k7qyzna08822ncaz5l00wwxkwcdg4j9h3z2g0ay23q640pclg";
  };
  # We need unzip to build this package
  buildInputs = [ pkgs.unzip ];
  # Installing simply means copying all files to the output directory
  installPhase = "mkdir -p $out; cp -R * $out/";
};

in {

  services.wordpress.sites."localhost" = {
    themes = [ responsive ];
    plugins = [ akismet ];
    virtualHost.adminAddr = "hello@example.org";
    extraConfig = ''
      // Activate and enable theme responsive as default
      define ('WP_DEFAULT_THEME', 'responsive');
    '';
  };

}

Unfortunately you'll have to enable plugins every time you update or install them manually. Hopefully Wordpress plugins and themes will also be packaged inside the Nixpkgs repository, see this draft pull request.

Tips and tricks

Enable SSL behind reverse proxy

In case you're running Wordpress behind a reverse proxy which offers a SSL/https connection to the outside, you can force Wordpress to use the https protocol

services.wordpress.sites."localhost".extraConfig = ''
  // Needed to run behind reverse proxy
  define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
  $_SERVER['HTTPS']='on';
'';

Troubleshooting

Enable logging

To enable logging add the following lines to extraConfig

services.wordpress.sites."localhost".extraConfig = ''
  define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
  define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
  ini_set( 'error_log', '/var/lib/wordpress/localhost/debug.log' );
'';

Since the default location to the folder wp-content is not writable, we redirect the log file path to /var/lib/wordpress/localhost/debug.log. All error messages will be stored there. Change the folder name localhost to the name of your site.

In case you want to print error messages directly in your browser, append following line

services.wordpress.sites."localhost".extraConfig = ''
  @ini_set( 'display_errors', 1 );
'';

Please note that this exposes sensible information about your server setup therefore this option should not be enabled in production.