The Arduino Portenta X8 is a powerful board that has many features that can be easily utilized with the help of Docker containers. In this tutorial, we will be using the Portenta X8 to host a web server and run WordPress using containers. This is a simple way to configure and run your own database server container and WordPress page. We can then access the WordPress site on the X8 through our web browser and begin setting it up.
First, make sure your Portenta X8 is set up correctly by following the User Manual's Out-of-the-Box Experience.
The WordPress container we use is a multi-container application, which also requires a database server container. The WordPress multi-container application uses Apache as its web server. It is required to make the service operational and comes included within the container. We will be using MariaDB as our database server as a container instance.
This container can run on the Portenta X8's architecture. To start using these containers is to build a docker-compose.yml file. This file contains information regarding what image we want to install and important configuration details, such as the username for the database, password, timezone, and database name. The same goes for the WordPress container: it will include the password and username. We will also enter the database hostname and which container will be used as the database. We recommend changing the default passwords to more secure ones by replacing the default password defined in the file below.
In this section, you can find the complete docker-compose.yml file that we will be using for this tutorial.
1version: "3.9"2 3services:4 db:5 image: mariadb:latest6 container_name: mariadb7 environment:8 - PUID=10009 - PGID=100010 - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=Wordpress11 - TZ=Europe/London12 - MYSQL_DATABASE=Wordpress13 - MYSQL_USER=Wordpress14 - MYSQL_PASSWORD=Wordpress15 volumes:16 - db_data:/var/lib/mysql17 restart: unless-stopped18 19 Wordpress:20 depends_on:21 - db22 image: wordpress:latest23 volumes:24 - Wordpress_data:/var/www/html25 ports:26 - "8000:80"27 restart: always28 environment:29 WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db30 WORDPRESS_DB_USER: Wordpress31 WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: Wordpress32 WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: Wordpress33volumes:34 Wordpress_data: {}35 db_data: {}
Now let's create a directory on our X8 and put this docker-compose.yml file on our device. You can download the file by clicking here.
First, we create a directory where we want to add our docker-compose.yml file. Using the
mkdir
command we will create a directory named "wordpress-test". Navigate into this directory with a simple cd
command. Either copy the docker-compose.yml file into this directory or create it directly here.To create the file, we can use
cat > docker-compose.yml
, this will create the file, so you can copy the content of the file from above and paste it. Push enter once to go to a new line and press ctrl C
to exit the file editor. To copy the file from your computer onto the device use:1adb push <path to docker-compose.yml file> /home/fio/wordpress-test
Alternatively, you could place the
docker-compose.yml
file inside the wordpress-test
directory and push the file using the following command:1adb push .\wordpress-test\ /home/fio
Both options work fine and depend on how you would like to handle the file.
Remember that you may need to run the next command to gain admin access for running the Docker's commands:
which default password is sudo su -
fio
Before installing the containers, make sure that no other container is running on the ports that the WordPress container will use. You can check what containers are running and what port they are using by running the
docker ps -a
command. This will show a list of the currently installed and running containers on the Portenta X8.To remove a container first stop it with
docker stop <container id>
, then you can run docker rm <container id>
to remove it. If you want more information about handling containers on your Portenta X8, take a look at our Managing Containers with Docker tutorial.When you are in the correct directory and no other container is running on the ports that WordPress will use, you can now run
docker compose up -d
. Using the -d
tag in the command will allow running these containers in the background. If you run the command without the -d
tag, the application will exit when you close the terminal.When the command is executed it will start installing the WordPress and MariaDB containers. This can take a while. To get the output from the containers use:
docker-compose logs -f
. Once it is done you can connect to the device and site.
To connect to the WordPress setup site, you simply need to access it with your Portenta X8's unique id and port. So we can use the following address format:
1http://portenta-x8-<uuid>.local:<port>
Where you would substitute the
<uuid>
with your Portenta X8's unique id and the port chosen for the WordPress container with <port>
. The <uuid>
can be found on the setup page that is shown in the User Manual's Out-of-the-Box Experience, but you can also get it in the terminal when running adb
or you can go to http://192.168.7.1:8000
if you use Windows and Linux, on MacOS use http://192.168.8.1:8000
.When you connect, you should get some feedback in the terminal. Text will begin printing in the terminal, showing you information about the connection that has just been established as shown in the image below.
Now you should see a webpage, like the following image, in your browser.
You are now free to go through the WordPress setup process and configure it however you like.
If you want to remove the container, you have to go to
/home/fio/wordpress-test
directory (where we previously executed the docker-compose command) and execute the following commands according to your needs:Remove the container but preserves your WordPress database:
1docker compose down
Remove the container and the database:
1docker compose down --volumes
To make sure that it was successful, run
docker ps -a
and check that the WordPress and MariaDB containers have disappeared.In this tutorial, we went through how to install and run a WordPress and database container on the Portenta X8. We then accessed the WordPress site on our X8 through our web browser. So now you can set up your own WordPress site on your X8 device and access it from another device.
If the containers are not being installed or running correctly, check if there are any other containers currently running on the same ports as the ones used by the WordPress container. You can check it with
docker ps -a
.If there is any issue running docker commands, make sure you are using
sudo
before the commands or having root access using: sudo su -r
with password: fio
.If you cannot connect to the site when everything is running, you can double-check the X8's IP address. Run the command
ip -h address
in the adb shell. This will display the X8's IP address via USB and Wi-Fi®. Try connecting via those IP addresses if all the rest fails.