Thank you Rise, this is awesome! 🎉

I think we're almost there...you're successfully building and pushing the docker image, but our production image will need to be built slightly different than our development image.

In our development image, we build all of the WordPress core files into the image, but then we mount our theme and configuration files as volumes when starting the development container via docker compose. This is great for development, because instead of building our source code into the docker image, we can tell the container to read these files from our local disk, meaning that any changes to theme/configuration files do not require a rebuild of the docker image and restart of the container.

However, in our production image, we want to build all of our final template and configuration files into the image itself, so that all of that code is bundled with the image, and it can essentially run self-contained without the need to mount external volumes.

In order to do that, I think we can leverage multi-stage docker builds.

This will involve modifying Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml. Essentially, we'll use our existing steps in our Dockerfile as the first stage of the build, called dev, and then copy our build files into the image in a second stage, called prod.

Updates to Dockerfile

At the top of Dockerfile, we'll add as dev as the build stage name:

FROM php:8.1-apache-buster as dev

This tells docker that all of the subsequent steps are part of the dev stage. Then, at the bottom of the Dockerfile, we can specify a new stage called prod, which uses dev as a base:

FROM dev as prod

After that, we need to add some COPY steps as part of this stage to copy over relevant files into the prod image. For example, to copy the theme files:

COPY theme /var/www/html/wp-content/themes/sparkpress

We can look at the volumes mounted in docker-compose.yml to see which files / folders we need to copy over. I think we'll need corresponding COPY lines for each of these:

• theme
• wp-configs/wp-config.php
• wp-configs/php.ini
• wp-configs/.htaccess.

Updates to docker-compose.yml

Our docker-compose.yml configuration is currently only used for local development. We can update the build settings so that it only builds the dev stage as a target:

    build:
      context: .
      target: dev

The result is that:

1. Our development environment runs the same, because it uses docker-compose and only builds the dev part of the image.
2. Our production build, using docker build . runs both stages of the build, copying the necessary files into the final image that is pushed to Github.

Validation

We can validate this by verifying that:

• restarting the development environment doesn't break anything
• Running docker build . --tag ghcr.io/sparkbox/sparkpress:latest locally copies the production files into the image (requires running npm run build:prod first)
• We can run a container from the production image locally (I will follow up with more details here)

@rise-erpelding apologies for the delay, following up here. There are a few more updates that I think we should make, then this should be ready to merge.

• Rename the action to deploy.docker.yml to match the format of deploy.pantheon.yml
• Add the workflow_dispatch to the action (example here)
• Add DEPLOY_WITH_DOCKER conditional flag

To answer your questions:

Is this something that needs to be addressed? And if not, would the next step be to run the GitHub action again before merging and confirm that it seems to be doing the right things?

After we make the updates, we can pair to test this via workflow_dispatch to ensure test the deployed image.

Also, we will ultimately need some documentation around this process, but I will create a new issue for that.