bitnamicharts/wordpress repository overview

⁠Bitnami Secure Images Helm chart for WordPress

WordPress is the world's most popular blogging and content management platform. Powerful yet simple, everyone from students to global corporations use it to build beautiful, functional websites.

Overview of WordPress⁠

⁠ TL;DR

helm install my-release oci://REGISTRY_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME/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, and the Bitnami Memcached chart⁠ that can be used to cache database queries.

⁠ Before you begin

• Kubernetes 1.23+
• Helm 3.8.0+
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure

⁠ Installing the Chart

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

helm install my-release oci://REGISTRY_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME/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.

⁠ Configuration and installation details

This section describes credentials, configuration, and other installation options.

⁠ Resource requests and limits

Bitnami charts allow setting resource requests and limits for all containers inside the chart deployment. These are inside the resources value (check parameter table). Setting requests is essential for production workloads and these should be adapted to your specific use case.

To make this process easier, the chart contains the resourcesPreset values, which automatically sets the resources section according to different presets. Check these presets in the bitnami/common chart⁠. However, in production workloads using resourcesPreset is discouraged as it may not fully adapt to your specific needs. Find more information on container resource management in the official Kubernetes documentation⁠.

⁠ Update credentials

Bitnami charts configure credentials at first boot. Any further change in the secrets or credentials require manual intervention. Follow these instructions:

• Update the user password following the upstream documentation⁠
• Update the password secret with the new values (replace the SECRET_NAME, PASSWORD and SMTP_PASSWORD placeholders)

kubectl create secret generic SECRET_NAME --from-literal=wordpress-password=PASSWORD --from-literal=smtp-password=SMTP_PASSWORD --dry-run -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

⁠ Prometheus metrics

This chart can be integrated with Prometheus by setting metrics.enabled to true. This will deploy a sidecar container with apache-exporter⁠ in all pods and a metrics service, which can be configured under the metrics.service section. This metrics service will have the necessary annotations to be automatically scraped by Prometheus.

⁠Prometheus requirements

It is necessary to have a working installation of Prometheus or Prometheus Operator for the integration to work. Install the Bitnami Prometheus helm chart⁠ or the Bitnami Kube Prometheus helm chart⁠ to easily have a working Prometheus in your cluster.

⁠Integration with Prometheus Operator

The chart can deploy ServiceMonitor objects for integration with Prometheus Operator installations. To do so, set the value metrics.serviceMonitor.enabled=true. Ensure that the Prometheus Operator CustomResourceDefinitions are installed in the cluster or it will fail with the following error:

no matches for kind "ServiceMonitor" in version "monitoring.coreos.com/v1"

Install the Bitnami Kube Prometheus helm chart⁠ for having the necessary CRDs and the Prometheus Operator.

⁠ 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.

⁠ Known limitations

When performing admin operations that require activating the maintenance mode (such as updating a plugin or theme), it's activated in only one replica (see: bug report⁠). This implies that WP could be attending requests on other replicas while performing admin operations, with unpredictable consequences.

To avoid that, you can manually activate/deactivate the maintenance mode on every replica using the WP CLI. For instance, if you installed WP with three replicas, you can run the commands below to activate the maintenance mode in all of them (assuming that the release name is wordpress):

kubectl exec $(kubectl get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=wordpress -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') -c wordpress -- wp maintenance-mode activate
kubectl exec $(kubectl get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=wordpress -o jsonpath='{.items[1].metadata.name}') -c wordpress -- wp maintenance-mode activate
kubectl exec $(kubectl get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=wordpress -o jsonpath='{.items[2].metadata.name}') -c wordpress -- wp maintenance-mode activate

⁠ External database support

You may want to have WordPress connect to an external database rather than installing one inside your cluster. Typical reasons for this are to use a managed database service, or to share a common database server for all your applications. To achieve this, the chart allows you to specify credentials for an external database with the externalDatabase parameter⁠. You should also disable the MariaDB installation with the mariadb.enabled option. Here is an example:

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

If the database already contains data from a previous WordPress installation, set the wordpressSkipInstall parameter to true. This parameter forces the container to skip the WordPress installation wizard. Otherwise, the container will assume it is a fresh installation and execute the installation wizard, potentially modifying or resetting the data in the existing database.

Refer to the container documentation for more information⁠.

⁠ Memcached

This chart provides support for using Memcached to cache database queries and objects improving the website performance. To enable this feature, set wordpressConfigureCache and memcached.enabled parameters to true.

When this feature is enabled, a Memcached server will be deployed in your K8s cluster using the Bitnami Memcached chart and the W3 Total Cache⁠ plugin will be activated and configured to use the Memcached server for database caching.

It is also possible to use an external cache server rather than installing one inside your cluster. To achieve this, the chart allows you to specify credentials for an external cache server with the externalCache parameter⁠. You should also disable the Memcached installation with the memcached.enabled option. Here is an example:

wordpressConfigureCache=true
memcached.enabled=false
externalCache.host=myexternalcachehost
externalCache.port=11211

⁠ Gateway API

This chart provides support for exposing WordPress using the Gateway API⁠ and its HTTPRoute resource. If you have a Gateway controller installed on your cluster, such as APISIX, Contour, Envoy Gateway, NGINX Gateway Fabric or Kong Ingress Controller you can utilize the Gateway controller to serve your application. To enable Gateway API integration, set httpRoute.enabled to true. The Gateway to be used can be customized by setting the httpRoute.parentRefs parameter. By default, it will reference a Gateway named gateway in the same namespace as the release.

You can specify the list of hostnames to be mapped to the deployment using the httpRoute.hostnames parameter. Additionally, you can customize the rules used to route the traffic to the service by modifying the httpRoute.matches and httpRoute.filters parameters or adding new rules using the httpRoute.extraRules parameter.

⁠ Ingress

This chart provides support for Ingress resources. If you have an ingress controller installed on your cluster, such as nginx-ingress-controller⁠ or contour⁠ you can utilize the ingress controller to serve your application. To enable Ingress integration, set ingress.enabled to true.

The most common scenario is to have one host name mapped to the deployment. In this case, the ingress.hostname property can be used to set the host name. The ingress.tls parameter can be used to add the TLS configuration for this host.

However, it is also possible to have more than one host. To facilitate this, the ingress.extraHosts parameter (if available) can be set with the host names specified as an array. The ingress.extraTLS parameter (if available) can also be used to add the TLS configuration for extra hosts.

Adding the TLS parameter (where available) will cause the chart to generate HTTPS URLs, and the application will be available on port 443. The actual TLS secrets do not have to be generated by this chart. However, if TLS is enabled, the Ingress record will not work until the TLS secret exists.

Learn more about Ingress controllers⁠.

⁠ Securing traffic using TLS

This chart facilitates the creation of TLS secrets for use with the Ingress controller (although this is not mandatory). There are several common use cases:

• Generate certificate secrets based on chart parameters.
• Enable externally generated certificates.
• Manage application certificates via an external service (like cert-manager⁠).
• Create self-signed certificates within the chart (if supported).

In the first two cases, a certificate and a key are needed. Files are expected in .pem format.

Here is an example of a certificate file:

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

Here is an example of a certificate key:

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

• If using Helm to manage the certificates based on the parameters, copy these values into the certificate and key values for a given *.ingress.secrets entry.
• If managing TLS secrets separately, it is necessary to create a TLS secret with name INGRESS_HOSTNAME-tls (where INGRESS_HOSTNAME is a placeholder to be replaced with the host name you set using the *.ingress.hostname parameter).
• If your cluster has a cert-manager⁠ add-on to automate the management and issuance of TLS certificates, add to *.ingress.annotations the corresponding ones⁠ for cert-manager.
• If using self-signed certificates created by Helm, set both *.ingress.tls and *.ingress.selfSigned to true.

⁠ .htaccess files

For performance and security reasons, it is a good practice to configure Apache with the AllowOverride None directive. Instead of using .htaccess files, Apache will load the same directives at boot time. These directives are located in /opt/bitnami/wordpress/wordpress-htaccess.conf.

By default, the container image includes all the default .htaccess files in WordPress (together with the default plugins). To enable this feature, install the chart with the value allowOverrideNone=yes.

However, some plugins may include .htaccess directives that will not be loaded when AllowOverride is set to None. To make them work, create a custom wordpress-htaccess.conf file with all the required directives. After creating it, create a Kubernetes ConfigMap with it (for example, named custom-htaccess) and install the chart with the correct parameters as shown below:

    allowOverrideNone=true
    customHTAccessCM=custom-htaccess

Some plugins permit editing the .htaccess file and it may be necessary to persist it in order to keep those edits. To make these plugins work, set the htaccessPersistenceEnabled parameter as shown below:

    allowOverrideNone=false
    htaccessPersistenceEnabled=true

⁠ Backup and restore

To back up and restore Helm chart deployments on Kubernetes, you need to back up the persistent volumes from the source deployment and attach them to a new deployment using Velero⁠, a Kubernetes backup/restore tool. Find the instructions for using Velero in this guide⁠.

⁠ FIPS parameters

The FIPS parameters only have effect if you are using images from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog⁠.

For more information on this new support, please refer to the FIPS Compliance section⁠.

⁠ 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.

If you encounter errors when working with persistent volumes, refer to our troubleshooting guide for persistent volumes⁠.

⁠ Additional environment variables

In case you want to add extra environment variables (useful for advanced operations like custom init scripts), you can use the extraEnvVars property.

wordpress:
  extraEnvVars:
    - name: LOG_LEVEL
      value: error

Alternatively, you can use a ConfigMap or a Secret with the environment variables. To do so, use the extraEnvVarsCM or the extraEnvVarsSecret values.

⁠ Sidecars

If additional containers are needed in the same pod as WordPress (such as additional metrics or logging exporters), they can be defined using the sidecars parameter.

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

If these sidecars export extra ports, extra port definitions can be added using the service.extraPorts parameter (where available), as shown in the example below:

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

If additional init containers are needed in the same pod, they can be defined using the initContainers parameter. Here is an example:

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

Learn more about sidecar containers⁠ and init containers⁠.

⁠ Pod affinity

This chart allows you to set your custom affinity using the affinity parameter. Learn more about Pod affinity in the Kubernetes documentation⁠.

As an alternative, use one of the preset configurations for pod affinity, pod anti-affinity, and node affinity available at the bitnami/common⁠ chart. To do so, set the podAffinityPreset, podAntiAffinityPreset, or nodeAffinityPreset parameters.

⁠ Parameters

The following subsections list global, common, and component-specific parameters.

⁠ Global parameters

⁠ Common parameters

Note: the README for this chart is longer than the DockerHub length limit of 25000, so it has been trimmed. The full README can be found at https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-tanzu/bitnami-secure-images/bitnami-secure-images/services/bsi-app-doc/apps-charts-wordpress-index.html⁠