Question 417367 in Wordpress Question posted in
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How to update WordPress & PHP when they are installed by Docker

Docker image

I have installed WordPress with Docker guided by this tutorial:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-with-docker-compose

The tutorial is using this docker-compose.yml file that is using wordpress:5.1.1-fpm-alpine image:

version: '3'

services:
  db:
    image: mysql:8.0
    container_name: db
...

  wordpress:
    depends_on:
      - db
    image: wordpress:5.1.1-fpm-alpine # <-- Note the WordPress version here
    container_name: wordpress
...

Outdated WordPress version

Now, I have to install some plugins, but they are requiring some newer versions of the WordPress. Like the WP phpMyAdmin plugin:

This plugin doesn’t work with your version of WordPress. Please update WordPress.

WP phpMyAdmin screenshot

The WordPress dashboard is displaying update notifications too:

WordPress 6.7.1 is available! Please update now.

WP update notification

Try to update

But when I click on the Please update now. link, I receive this error:

You cannot update because WordPress 6.7.1 requires PHP version 7.2.24 or higher. You are running version 7.2.18.

Update error

Question

How can I reliably update the WordPress along with PHP? I don’t want to mess up the whole Docker setup.

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    Update by Docker image version

    It didn't work

    I updated the Docker images like this:

    Commit

    But, the website threw the 500 error:

    500 error

    Bad restore

    I had taken backups of Docker named volumes by this approach: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79247304/3405291

    So, I did restore the Docker named volumes. However, the website threw this error:

    Error establishing a database connection

    Database error

    Fix restore

    The database connection error got fixed. To do so, I deleted everything inside the database volume by rm -rf * command:

    /var/lib/docker/volumes/wordpress_dbdata/_data/

    Then I restored the Docker volume of the database.

    This screenshot shows the contents of the database volume before deleting/restoring and after:

    Database volume: before & after

    As can be seen, before deleting everything, there were some extra files. Probably those files were messing around with the database connection.

    Implication

    The update by modifying the version of Docker images didn't work. But backup/restore helped us.


  2. 0

    First and foremost, wordpress:5.1.1-fpm-alpine doesn’t seem to be an official WordPress image. These are always kind of hard to maintain, easy to set up, but a whole lot of headache to maintain. Anyway, to do such an upgrade, you will have to upgrade wordpress and php inside the container as well as their dependencies, goodluck with that! A better approach would be to create a backup of everthing (do a snapshot of the entire server if possible). Then run a new version of wordpress locally using a restored copy of the db, once everything works, you can use a newer image with that data.

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