Chainguard Image for wordpress

Minimalist Wolfi-based WordPress images.

Chainguard Images are regularly-updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.

Download this Image

This image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/wordpress:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard registry.

This image was designed to work as a drop-in replacement for the official WordPress FPM-Alpine image, with a distroless variant for increased security on production environments.

The latest-dev variant should be used to install and customize WordPress with themes and plugins. It has the same features from the upstream WordPress image, with an entrypoint script to set up the database via environment variables. The latest variant is a production-ready distroless image that should be used to run the WordPress site in a multi-stage build.

Example Docker Compose Setup

You can use the following docker-compose.yml file to set up a development environment to install and customize WordPress:

services:
  app:
    image: cgr.dev/chainguard/wordpress:latest-dev
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: mariadb
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wp-user
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wp-password
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress
    volumes:
      - document-root:/var/www/html
    networks:
      - wolfi

  nginx:
    image: cgr.dev/chainguard/nginx
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8000:8080
    volumes:
      - document-root:/var/www/html
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
    networks:
      - wolfi

  mariadb:
    image: cgr.dev/chainguard/mariadb
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MARIADB_ALLOW_EMPTY_ROOT_PASSWORD: 1
      MARIADB_USER: wp-user
      MARIADB_PASSWORD: wp-password
      MARIADB_DATABASE: wordpress
    ports:
      - 3306:3306
    networks:
      - wolfi

networks:
  wolfi:
    driver: bridge

volumes:
  document-root:

For this setup to work, you'll need an nginx.conf file with the following content:

pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    server {
        listen 8080;
        index index.php index.html;
        root /var/www/html;
        charset utf-8;
        client_max_body_size 100M;
        timeout 300;

        location / {
            include  /etc/nginx/mime.types;
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
        }

        location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
        location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
            fastcgi_pass app:9000;
            fastcgi_index index.php;
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        }

        location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
            deny all;
        }
    }
}

After running docker compose up, your WordPress site will be available at http://localhost:8000. You can follow the installation instructions to set up your site and test your setup, but persisting customizations such as themes and plugins will require a different strategy that requires either setting up a volume for your theme and plugins or copying the custom content to the image through a Dockerfile that uses cgr.dev/chainguard/wordpress:latest-dev as the base image.

Contact Support

If you have a Zendesk account (typically set up for you by your Customer Success Manager) you can reach out to Chainguard's Customer Success team through our Zendesk portal.

What are Chainguard Images?

Chainguard Images are a collection of container images designed for security and minimalism.

Many Chainguard Images are distroless; they contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These images do not even contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Images are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Images include:

• Minimal design, with no unnecessary software bloat
• Automated nightly builds to ensure Images are completely up-to-date and contain all available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs (software bills of materials) attesting the provenance of all artifacts within the Image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

-dev Variants

As mentioned previously, Chainguard’s distroless Images have no shell or package manager by default. This is great for security, but sometimes you need these things, especially in builder images. For those cases, most (but not all) Chainguard Images come paired with a -dev variant which does include a shell and package manager.

Although the -dev image variants have similar security features as their distroless versions, such as complete SBOMs and signatures, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. The general recommendation is to use the -dev variants only to build the application and then copy all application artifacts into a distroless image, which will result in a final container image that has a minimal attack surface and won’t allow package installations or logins.

That being said, it’s worth noting that -dev variants of Chainguard Images are completely fine to run in production environments. After all, the -dev variants are still more secure than many popular container images based on fully-featured operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu since they carry less software, follow a more frequent patch cadence, and offer attestations for what they include.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Images, we encourage you to visit Chainguard Academy, our documentation and education platform.