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Preparing NixOS for hosting a wordpress site

There are multiple ways of achieving the goal of installing wordpress on NixOS.

One of them is treating wordpress like any other php application. This way we can control the wordpress installation independent of the NixOS installation.

There are several reasons to do this.

When you want to use a versioning system for your wordpress installation, like git, the wordpress would be kept independent of the system. In this situation it would be easy to have development environments across multiple systems.

Another reason is making use of composer as project dependency manager.

In this setup I am going to use the Caddy web server and a MariaDB database server.

The first step would be to setup two Caddy virtual hosts, one for the plain domain name and the other for the www-variant. For this to happen we can use the following nix code:

 # Using caddy webserver.
 services.caddy.enable = true;

 # Caddy virtualhosts.
 services.caddy.virtualHosts."www.domain.tld".extraConfig = ''
   redir https://domain.tld{uri} permanent
 '';
 services.caddy.virtualHosts."domain.tld".extraConfig = ''
   respond "Hello, world!"
 '';

To setup SSL and enable HTTPS we will use the following:

 security.acme.certs."domain.tld" = {
   group = config.services.caddy.group;
   domain = "domain.tld";
   extraDomainNames = [ "www.domain.tld" ];
   dnsProvider = "cloudflare";
   dnsResolver = "1.1.1.1:53";
   dnsPropagationCheck = true;
 };

In both code blocks replace “domain.tld” with the actual domain name.

Now it is time to enable PHP and let caddy deliver the result from PHP.

To do so we modify the first block to contain the following:

 services.caddy.virtualHosts."domain.tld".extraConfig = ''
   root * /var/www/domain.tld/web
   file_server
   php_fastcgi unix/${config.services.phpfpm.pools.php82.socket}
 '';

And add the following php-fpm configuration:

 services.phpfpm.pools."php82" = {
    user = "caddy";
    group = "caddy";
    phpPackage = pkgs.php82;
    settings = {
      "listen.owner" = config.services.caddy.user;
      "pm" = "dynamic";
      "pm.max_children" = 32;
      "pm.max_requests" = 500;
      "pm.start_servers" = 2;
      "pm.min_spare_servers" = 2;
      "pm.max_spare_servers" = 5;
      "php_admin_value[error_log]" = "stderr";
      "php_admin_flag[log_errors]" = true;
      "catch_workers_output" = true;
    };
  };

And lastly we set up a MariaDB instance to hold our wordpress data.

services.mysql.enable = true;
  services.mysql.package = pkgs.mariadb_114;
  services.mysql.initialScript = pkgs.writeText "setup.sql" ''
    CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
    GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO "wp_user"@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "wp_password" WITH GRANT OPTION;
  '';

Now after deploying the changes, the NixOS server will be ready to render the wordpress installation if present within the “/var/www/domain.tld/web” directory.

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