WordPress on Azure App Service for Containers using OpenLiteSpeed

This repository contains Docker images for WordPress running on Azure App Service Linux container using OpenLiteSpeed web server.

Image Repository

https://hub.docker.com/r/johnwcarew/azure-app-service-openlitespeed-wordpress

Known issues

None.

Build Components

Component	Version
Linux	Ubuntu 18.04
OpenLiteSpeed	1.6.18
PHP	7.4
WordPress	5.6
LiteSpeed Cache	latest-stable
Google XML Sitemaps	latest-stable

• SSH has been enabled on port 2222 to be able to SSH to the container in Azure App Service.
• WP-Cron is setup to run via task/cron scheduler every 10 minutes. Set PHP_CRON environment variable to a valid cron formated schedule to change from the default execute interval. Be sure to apply the define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); setting in wp-config.php, so that WP-Cron does not slowdown your page loads. The last WP-Cron task run is logged to /home/site/cron.log
  • Run setup-wp-cron from SSH shell to copy cron.sh to /home/site directory, if it does not exist already.

Container storage for site

With the update to v1.2 of this container, the web server now serves the site from a local copy of the site that is synchronized from the durable storage. The container runs a synchronization service that will synchronize the /home/site/ with /var/www/vhosts/site-local/ bidirectionally. It monitors the /home/site directory for changes, if it detects changes it runs the synchronization. If it does not detect any changes, it will run a synchronization every two hours.

Commands

These are supported commands that you can manually execute from the Azure App Service's SSH shell.

• sync-now - Start a synchronization task immediately.
• clean-sync - Initiates a fresh clean copy from durable to local
  • Clears out local site's wwwroot directory
  • Clears folder's synchronization state
  • Copies sync maintenance template to local site
  • Copies site content from /home/site/wwwroot to /var/www/vhosts/site-local/wwwroot

Maintenance template

When a fresh container is deployed or a container is regenerated from an updated docker image, the initial local site's wwwroot directory is empty. To minimize showing a 404 or 500 error while the site copies from durable to local storage, a sync_maintenance.html template file is copied to the root of the local site. If this file and the maintenance .htaccess exists, it will always be displayed to any browser accessing the site.

Custom maintenance template

You can place a sync_maintenance.html file with your own custom HTML within the /home/site directory in the durable storage. This would be the /site directory if uploading from FTP.

Deployment

Database

1. Create a managed Azure Database for MySQL.
   • Quickstart: Create an Azure Database for MySQL server by using the Azure portal
2. Follow WordPress's quick install guide to setup the DB & user.

ARM Template

A sample Azure arm template is available in the github repo.

• The app plan must be an Azure App Service Linux plan.
• Use the MySQL server's FQDN, database name, and user created in the Database section to fill in the following parameters in the ARM template.
  • wordpressDbHost
  • wordpressDbName
  • wordpressDbUser
  • wordpressDbPassword
• After deployment, be sure to configure the LiteSpeed Cache plug-in in WordPress for best performance.
• Activate the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, and use it as sitemap url in LiteSpeed Cache's crawler options.