WordPress

WordPress is one of the most versatile open source content management systems on the market. A publishing platform for building blogs and websites.

This Helm chart is deprecated

Given the stable deprecation timeline, the Bitnami maintained WordPress Helm chart is now located at bitnami/charts.

The Bitnami repository is already included in the Hubs and we will continue providing the same cadence of updates, support, etc that we've been keeping here these years. Installation instructions are very similar, just adding the bitnami repo and using it during the installation (bitnami/<chart> instead of stable/<chart>)

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm install my-release bitnami/<chart>           # Helm 3
$ helm install --name my-release bitnami/<chart>    # Helm 2

To update an exisiting stable deployment with a chart hosted in the bitnami repository you can execute

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm upgrade my-release bitnami/<chart>

Issues and PRs related to the chart itself will be redirected to bitnami/charts GitHub repository. In the same way, we'll be happy to answer questions related to this migration process in this issue created as a common place for discussion.

TL;DR;

helm install my-release stable/wordpress

Introduction

This chart bootstraps a WordPress deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

It also packages the Bitnami MariaDB chart which is required for bootstrapping a MariaDB deployment for the database requirements of the WordPress application.

Bitnami charts can be used with Kubeapps for deployment and management of Helm Charts in clusters. This chart has been tested to work with NGINX Ingress, cert-manager, fluentd and Prometheus on top of the BKPR.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.12+
• Helm 2.11+ or Helm 3.0-beta3+
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure
• ReadWriteMany volumes for deployment scaling

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

helm install my-release stable/wordpress

The command deploys WordPress on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The Parameters section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Tip: List all releases using helm list

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

helm delete my-release

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Parameters

The following table lists the configurable parameters of the WordPress chart and their default values per section/component:

Global parameters

Common parameters

WordPress parameters

Ingress parameters

Database parameters

Metrics parameters

The above parameters map to the env variables defined in bitnami/wordpress. For more information please refer to the bitnami/wordpress image documentation.

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

helm install my-release \
  --set wordpressUsername=admin \
  --set wordpressPassword=password \
  --set mariadb.mariadbRootPassword=secretpassword \
    stable/wordpress

The above command sets the WordPress administrator account username and password to admin and password respectively. Additionally, it sets the MariaDB root user password to secretpassword.

Alternatively, a YAML file that specifies the values for the above parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

helm install my-release -f values.yaml stable/wordpress

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

Configuration and installation details

Rolling VS Immutable tags

It is strongly recommended to use immutable tags in a production environment. This ensures your deployment does not change automatically if the same tag is updated with a different image.

Bitnami will release a new chart updating its containers if a new version of the main container, significant changes, or critical vulnerabilities exist.

Production configuration

This chart includes a values-production.yaml file where you can find some parameters oriented to production configuration in comparison to the regular values.yaml. You can use this file instead of the default one.

• Set Apache AllowOverride directive to None:

- allowOverrideNone: false
+ allowOverrideNone: true

• Number of WordPress Pods to run:

- replicaCount: 1
+ replicaCount: 3

• Enable client source IP preservation:

- service.externalTrafficPolicy: Cluster
+ service.externalTrafficPolicy: Local

• PVC Access Mode:

- persistence.accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
+ ## To use the /admin portal and to ensure you can scale wordpress you need to provide a
+ ## ReadWriteMany PVC, if you dont have a provisioner for this type of storage
+ ## We recommend that you install the nfs provisioner and map it to a RWO volume
+ ## helm install nfs-server stable/nfs-server-provisioner --set persistence.enabled=true,persistence.size=10Gi
+ ##
+ persistence.accessMode: ReadWriteMany

• Start a side-car prometheus exporter:

- metrics.enabled: false
+ metrics.enabled: true

Note that values-production.yaml includes a replicaCount of 3, so there will be 3 WordPress pods. As a result, to use the "/admin" portal and to ensure you can scale wordpress you need to provide a ReadWriteMany PVC, if you don't have a provisioner for this type of storage, we recommend that you install the NFS provisioner chart (with the correct parameters, such as persistence.enabled=true and persistence.size=10Gi) and map it to a RWO volume.

Then you can deploy WordPress chart using the proper parameters:

persistence.storageClass=nfs
mariadb.master.persistence.storageClass=nfs

Sidecars

If you have a need for additional containers to run within the same pod as WordPress (e.g. an additional metrics or logging exporter), you can do so via the sidecars config parameter. Simply define your container according to the Kubernetes container spec.

sidecars:
- name: your-image-name
  image: your-image
  imagePullPolicy: Always
  ports:
  - name: portname
   containerPort: 1234

If these sidecars export extra ports, you can add extra port definitions using the service.extraPorts value:

service:
...
  extraPorts:
  - name: extraPort
    port: 11311
    targetPort: 11311

Using an external database

Sometimes you may want to have Wordpress connect to an external database rather than installing one inside your cluster, e.g. to use a managed database service, or use run a single database server for all your applications. To do this, the chart allows you to specify credentials for an external database under the externalDatabase parameter. You should also disable the MariaDB installation with the mariadb.enabled option. For example with the following parameters:

mariadb.enabled=false
externalDatabase.host=myexternalhost
externalDatabase.user=myuser
externalDatabase.password=mypassword
externalDatabase.database=mydatabase
externalDatabase.port=3306

Note also if you disable MariaDB per above you MUST supply values for the externalDatabase connection.

Ingress

This chart provides support for ingress resources. If you have an ingress controller installed on your cluster, such as nginx-ingress or traefik you can utilize the ingress controller to serve your WordPress application.

To enable ingress integration, please set ingress.enabled to true

Hosts

Most likely you will only want to have one hostname that maps to this WordPress installation. If that's your case, the property ingress.hostname will set it. However, it is possible to have more than one host. To facilitate this, the ingress.extraHosts object is can be specified as an array. You can also use ingress.extraTLS to add the TLS configuration for extra hosts.

For each host indicated at ingress.extraHosts, please indicate a name, path, and any annotations that you may want the ingress controller to know about.

Indicating TLS will cause WordPress to generate HTTPS URLs, and WordPress will be connected to at port 443. The actual TLS secret do not have to be generated by this chart. However, please note that if TLS is enabled, the ingress record will not work until this secret exists.

For annotations, please see this document. Not all annotations are supported by all ingress controllers, but this document does a good job of indicating which annotation is supported by many popular ingress controllers.

TLS Secrets

This chart will facilitate the creation of TLS secrets for use with the ingress controller, however, this is not required. There are three common use cases:

• Helm generates/manages certificate secrets
• User generates/manages certificates separately
• An additional tool (like kube-lego) manages the secrets for the application

In the first two cases, one will need a certificate and a key. We would expect them to look like this:

• certificate files should look like (and there can be more than one certificate if there is a certificate chain)

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAIaCwivkeB5EMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMFYxCzAJBgNV
...
jScrvkiBO65F46KioCL9h5tDvomdU1aqpI/CBzhvZn1c0ZTf87tGQR8NK7v7
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

• keys should look like:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEogIBAAKCAQEAvLYcyu8f3skuRyUgeeNpeDvYBCDcgq+LsWap6zbX5f8oLqp4
...
wrj2wDbCDCFmfqnSJ+dKI3vFLlEz44sAV8jX/kd4Y6ZTQhlLbYc=
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

If you are going to use Helm to manage the certificates, please copy these values into the certificate and key values for a given ingress.secrets entry.

If you are going to manage TLS secrets outside of Helm, please know that you can create a TLS secret (named wordpress.local-tls for example).

Please see this example for more information.

Ingress-terminated https

In cases where HTTPS/TLS is terminated on the ingress, you may run into an issue where non-https liveness and readiness probes result in a 302 (redirect from HTTP to HTTPS) and are interpreted by Kubernetes as not-live/not-ready. (See Kubernetes issue #47893 on GitHub for further details about 302 not being interpreted as "successful".) To work around this problem, use livenessProbeHeaders and readinessProbeHeaders to pass the same headers that your ingress would pass in order to get an HTTP 200 status result. For example (where the following is in a --values-referenced file):

livenessProbeHeaders:
  - name: X-Forwarded-Proto
    value: https
readinessProbeHeaders:
  - name: X-Forwarded-Proto
    value: https

Any number of name/value pairs may be specified; they are all copied into the liveness or readiness probe definition.

Disabling .htaccess

For performance and security reasons, it is a good practice to configure Apache with AllowOverride None. Instead of using .htaccess files, Apache will load the same dircetives at boot time. These directives are located in /opt/bitnami/wordpress/wordpress-htaccess.conf. The container image includes by default these directives all of the default .htaccess files in WordPress (together with the default plugins). To enable this feature, install the chart with the following value: allowOverrideNone=yes

However, some plugins may include .htaccess directives that will not be loaded when AllowOverride is set to None. A way to make them work would be to create your own wordpress-htaccess.conf file with all the required dircectives to make the plugin work. After creating it, then create a ConfigMap with it and install the chart with the correct parameters:

allowOverrideNone=true
customHTAccessCM=custom-htaccess

Persistence

The Bitnami WordPress image stores the WordPress data and configurations at the /bitnami path of the container.

Persistent Volume Claims are used to keep the data across deployments. This is known to work in GCE, AWS, and minikube. See the Parameters section to configure the PVC or to disable persistence.

Upgrading

To 9.0.0

The Bitnami WordPress image was migrated to a "non-root" user approach. Previously the container ran as the root user and the Apache daemon was started as the daemon user. From now on, both the container and the Apache daemon run as user 1001. You can revert this behavior by setting the parameters securityContext.runAsUser, and securityContext.fsGroup to root. Chart labels and Ingress configuration were also adapted to follow the Helm charts best practices.

Consequences:

• The HTTP/HTTPS ports exposed by the container are now 8080/8443 instead of 80/443.
• No writing permissions will be granted on wp-config.php by default.
• Backwards compatibility is not guaranteed.

To upgrade to 9.0.0, install a new WordPress chart, and migrate your WordPress site using backup/restore tools such as VaultPress or All-in-One WP Migration.

To 8.0.0

Helm performs a lookup for the object based on its group (apps), version (v1), and kind (Deployment). Also known as its GroupVersionKind, or GVK. Changing the GVK is considered a compatibility breaker from Kubernetes' point of view, so you cannot "upgrade" those objects to the new GVK in-place. Earlier versions of Helm 3 did not perform the lookup correctly which has since been fixed to match the spec.

In https://github.com/helm/charts/pulls/12642 the apiVersion of the deployment resources was updated to apps/v1 in tune with the api's deprecated, resulting in compatibility breakage.

This major version signifies this change.

To 3.0.0

Backwards compatibility is not guaranteed unless you modify the labels used on the chart's deployments. Use the workaround below to upgrade from versions previous to 3.0.0. The following example assumes that the release name is wordpress:

kubectl patch deployment wordpress-wordpress --type=json -p='[{"op": "remove", "path": "/spec/selector/matchLabels/chart"}]'
kubectl delete statefulset wordpress-mariadb --cascade=false