Helm WP

Helm is Bernskiold Media's WordPress development framework. It's meant to be loaded as a Composer dev depenency and proves a set of tools to help you develop WordPress themes and plugins. Helm is heavily inspired by/a WordPress adapted fork of Laravel Sail.

Installation

To install, your project must be using composer. Require the package to your project:

composer require --dev bernskioldmedia/helm-wp

After installing, place a docker-compose.yml file in the root of your project. You can use the following as a starting point:

version: '3.3'
services:

    wordpress.test:
        build:
            context: ./wp-content/vendor/bernskioldmedia/helm-wp/runtimes/8.1
            dockerfile: Dockerfile
            args:
                WWWGROUP: '${WWWGROUP}'
        image: helm-7.4/app
        extra_hosts:
            - 'host.docker.internal:host-gateway'
        ports:
            - '80:80'
        environment:
            WWWUSER: '${WWWUSER}'
            HELM_WP: 1
            XDEBUG_MODE: '${HELM_XDEBUG_MODE:-off}'
            XDEBUG_CONFIG: '${HELM_XDEBUG_CONFIG:-client_host=host.docker.internal}'
        volumes:
            - '.:/var/www/html'
        networks:
            - helm

    # We try to use the same version of MySQL as the one used in production.
    # Other recipes are available in Notion.
    mariadb:
        image: 'mariadb:10.5'
        ports:
            - '3306:3306'
        environment:
            MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: 'wordpressroot'
            MYSQL_DATABASE: 'wordpress'
            MYSQL_USER: 'wordpress_user'
            MYSQL_PASSWORD: 'wordpress_password'
        volumes:
            - 'helm-mariadb:/var/lib/mysql'
        healthcheck:
            test: [ "CMD", "mysqladmin", "ping", "-pwordpress_password" ]
            retries: 3
            timeout: 5s
        networks:
            - helm

    # Mailpit is a fake SMTP server that catches all emails sent in the application.
    # It has a web interface to view the emails at: http://localhost:8025/
    mailpit:
        image: 'axllent/mailpit:latest'
        ports:
            - '1025:1025'
            - '8025:8025'
        networks:
            - helm

volumes:
    helm-mariadb:
    wordpress:

networks:
    helm:
        driver: bridge

Running helm

Helm ships with its own helm command. This is a wrapper around the docker-compose command that makes it easier to run commands inside the container.

Adapt the path in the command to match your project structure and where composer packages are installed in your project, if you have customized your vendor folder.

For more information on the helm command, run ./vendor/bin/helm help.

Creating an alias command

This alias enables you to just type helm to reach our Helm WP environment instead of having to always type the full path to the vendor/bin directory.

alias helm='[ -f helm ] && sh helm || sh vendor/bin/helm'

Starting the container

To start the container, run:

./vendor/bin/helm up

Stopping the container

To stop the container, run:

./vendor/bin/helm down

Running commands inside the container

Helm supports running commands from within the container. This is useful for running Composer commands, WP CLI commands and more.

# Composer
./vendor/bin/helm composer ...

# Node
./vendor/bin/helm node ...

# NPM
./vendor/bin/helm npm ...

# PHP Commands
./vendor/bin/helm php ...

# WP-CLI Commands
./vendor/bin/helm wp ...

Using a different PHP version

Helm ships with support for PHP versions from 7.4 to 8.2, although we recommend not using 7.4 for anything new as it has been officially deprecated.

To use a different PHP version, change the context in the wordpress.test service to point to the correct runtime folder. You should also change the image to match the runtime folder name.

For example, to use PHP 8.1, change it to:

  wordpress.test:
      build:
          context: ./wp-content/vendor/bernskioldmedia/helm-wp/runtimes/8.1
          image: helm-8.1/app

The available runtimes are:

• 7.4
• 8.0
• 8.1
• 8.2

Running Helm Migrate

Helm ships with a helper helm-migrate command to help migrate a production database to the local help environment.

It requires a wp-cli.yml file in the root of your project. You can use the following as a starting point:

@production:
     ssh: [email protected]/path/to/wordpress

To migrate the database, run:

./vendor/bin/helm-migrate run production

For more information on the helm-migrate command, run ./vendor/bin/helm-migrate help.

WordPress Multisite Support

Helm Migrate supports WordPress Multisite out of the box. To migrate the entire environment you only need to run the run command as above. However, sometimes you only want to migrate one or a few sites in a large network.

To do this, you use the selection command along with the envrionment name. It will then ask you for the site IDs.

./vendor/bin/helm-migrate selection production