Quickly spin up a headless Wordpress CMS on AWS using Docker Credit — https://www.superdesk.org/news/headless-cms Headless CMS is very popular at the moment. But what is a headless CMS and why should I start using one? A headless CMS is a backend that is from its frontends. The backend is where the content is created and published. Whereas the frontends are where the content is displayed (web, mobile apps, set-top box, Alexa, etc…). decoupled For example, a traditional CMS is a single website. The same website is used to add the content as it is to display the content. The backend and frontend are . coupled A headless CMS is only used to created and publish content. That content is then available through an API. The website or mobile apps, for displaying the content, are separate. But why is decoupled better? Here are some of the reasons: Faster and more flexible content delivery than traditional CMS Resiliency in the face of changes on the user interface side (future-proof) Rapid design iterations Enhanced security Fewer publisher and developer dependencies Simpler deployment *** Thanks for the list Brightspot Now that we all emphatically agree that headless CMS is the way to go. Let’s take a look at these awesome I created to help you spin up and manage your headless (Wordpress) CMS. CloudFormation templates To be clear, this is a Wordpress installation running on AWS using Infrastructure as Code and Docker. Wait… Why use Wordpress and not one of these cool new headless CMS services like or ? Well, these services are really great but they cost a lot of money, and I usually like to run everything myself, if I can help it. And… Wordpress is really good at managing content. Contently Cosmic JS But how can Wordpress be a headless CMS? Easy, it has an API. The trick is making Wordpress stateless so that it can autoscale, and run on AWS, with zero-downtime deployments. Ok, headless CMS is cool, Wordpress is pretty cool, let's continue. github.com rgfindl/headless-wordpress Headless Wordpress - AWS - Easy Setup. Architecture Our Wordpress instance is running as an using Docker. Elastic Container Service First we have the , then an cluster, then an EC2 instance, and finally an service with tasks. Our Wordpress service is exposed to the world via an . We’re using as our MySQL database. VPC ECS ECS Elastic Load Balancer RDS Our Wordpress service is stateless, which means we can’t rely on the file system to store content, like Wordpress Media or Plugins. Every time an instance of our Wordpress service is spawned it will only have the files that are baked into our Docker image. Let’s take a look at how we handle Wordpress Media first. We use a plugin called . This plugin allows us to store the Media in and use as the CDN. Take a look at the diagram below. We also use the same CDN to cache the Wordpress API… WP Offload Media S3 CloudFront Now how do we handle the Plugins? (We can ignore Templates because this is headless 😃) Remember when I talked about baking things into our Docker image? That’s it… We have to include the Plugins in our Docker image. Let’s take a look at that Dockerfile and go through it. As you can see our Dockerfile is really simple. It extends the latest Wordpress image and then installs 3 Plugins. It downloads, unzips, and copies each plugin to the directory. When you launch your Wordpress site for the first time you’ll have to activate these plugins. The activation status is stored in MySQL so you won’t have to do it every time your ECS tasks recycle. wordpress/wp-content/ Installation Alright, let’s get this architecture installed. First a few prerequisites. Prerequisites Install the following prerequisites: AWS Account EC2 Key Pair cim — ( ) npm install -g cim AWS CLI Stacks Now let’s install each stack one at a time. VPC ECS RDS ECR Wordpress VPC This creates the that our ECS cluster and RDS database will run in. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. cd vpccim stack-up ECS This creates an that our EC2’s will run in. Elastic Container Service Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS. cd vpccim stack-up RDS This creates a database cluster that our Wordpress application will use. Relational Database Service Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. cd rdsexport DatabaseUsername="???"; export DatabasePassword="???"; cim stack-up ECR This creates an that will hold the docker images of our wordpress service. Elastic Container Registry Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. cd ecrcim stack-up Wordpress Before we can launch this CloudFormation stack. We need to push our Wordpress image to ECR. Push Image cd wordpress/src Registry Authentication aws ecr get-login --registry-ids <account-id> copy/past output to perform docker login, also append to the repository url. /headless-wp Build Image docker build -t headless-wp:<version> . Push Image docker tag headless-wp:<version> <account-id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com/headless-wp:latest docker tag headless-wp:<version> <account-id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com/headless-wp:<version> docker push <account-id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com/headless-wp Update Version Make sure the parameter, in _cim.yml, matches the tag from above. The ECS Task Definition will pull the image from ECR. Version version Stack up Once the is set you can use to update the stack with the new version. Version cim stack-up cd wordpresscim stack-up Congratulations, your new Wordpress site is now available. First run through the Wordpress setup wizard. Next enable some of the plugins we added. Add a few blog posts and pages. Then check out the API. Ex: https://<cdn-url>/wp-json/wp/v2/posts Environment Variables Congratulations on getting your Headless Wordpress installed. If you got stuck anywhere along the way please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for help. One thing I want to explain is the Wordpress environment variables because they really tie everything together. They tell our Wordpress installation about the RDS database, the Media S3 bucket, and CloudFront CDN URL. Let’s take a look. These can be found in the Wordpress stack’s . AWS::ECS::TaskDefinition The variables are straight from the RDS stack. CloudFormation allows you to Export Output variables which can be imported in other stacks. WORDPRESS_DB_* The variable is where we configure the plugin. First we tell it to use our Task Role, , via the var. Then we the var to setup the plugin. WORDPRESS_CONFIG_EXTRA WP Offload Media AWS::IAM::Role AS3CF_AWS_USE_EC2_IAM_ROLE AS3CF_SETTINGS Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

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