Once, the automatic Backup of my WordPress site stopped working. Then, I tried to login to WordPress, but it was no longer possible.
Then I realized that my Backup device was Google Drive, which is quite big. So this might not be the root cause of the problem.
I started with the usual searches, e.g. the problem was probably with some Plugins. But all the actions didn’t work out.
As I have set up WordPress via Docker Containers, I was testing the staging WordPress system. That worked.
So I looked at the Docker setup, purging images, volumes, stopping containers, etc. No change.
Then I found that the inodes were at 100%. That was the problem. First, I found that some versions of docker had a problem generating dangling inodes. No success.
The following commands helped me find out, where the inodes/Files were generated.
# find the 50 directories with the biggest file count
find /var/lib/docker -xdev -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -50
# get the file storage usage
df -h
# get the inode usage
df -hi
# get the number of inodes in a directory
du --inodes -d 1
Finally, we found that in the following directory were over 7 million files:
After setting up the docker containers for WordPress and the NGINX Proxy Manager I still had one open issue: Sending mail was not possible. So I was looking for a solution to set up mail for the WordPress Docker setup.
I had the following options in mind:
Setting up a separate docker container with an e-mail server. More or less I just needed a so-called Smarthost, that takes sent-out e-mails from any docker container and forwards them to my e-mail provider, Gmail. I struggled to find a proper, small image of a mail server running on an RPi for a long time. Then open the ports of the WordPress containers and send the e-mail from the WordPress containers to the container with the Smarthost Mail server. Nevertheless, you must install any kind of mailer within the container to handle the mail() call coming from WordPress.
Set up an email server on the host (I used exim4) and let all Docker containers send their e-mails to the host, which will then be forwarded to the real e-mail provider by exim4. Still, you must install any kind of mailer within the container to handle the mail() call coming from WordPress. There were the following sub steps necessary:
Add also the local Home Assistant server/Port as the target
Reconfigure the port forwarding of the router to the NPM
Shutdown the old RPi4
So, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the different steps.
Configure the new RPi5 hardware and software
OK, let’s get the first new hardware, which means the new high-performance RPi5.
It took some time to be available on the market and the announced performance numbers looked promising.
As the power supply is quite strong I attached directly a SSD drive to the USB3 port.
So no need anymore for a USB hub!
Installing the latest Rasbian operating system on the SSD was pretty easy using the Raspian Imager.
I also configured the SSH access for it, of course.
So, how are we going further?
Install docker on the RPi5
As I wanted to run a WordPress life system and a WordPress staging system in my local network, I thought it would be a good idea to go with:
Docker to run multiple images/containers
Nginx Reverse Proxy to manage/route the traffic to/from these containers to the outside world
Install the docker containers
Setup a docker network manually
docker network create dockerwp
Create a directory for wp_prod, wp_staging, nginx
Define a file for common parameters used as anonymized volumes in the docker containers
Create docker-compose.yml for the Nginx Proxy
services:
app:
image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest'
container_name: nginx-proxy
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
# These ports are in format <host-port>:<container-port>
- '80:80' # Public HTTP Port
- '443:443' # Public HTTPS Port
- '81:81' # Admin Web Port
# Add any other Stream port you want to expose
# - '21:21' # FTP
# Uncomment the next line if you uncomment anything in the section
# environment:
# Uncomment this if you want to change the location of
# the SQLite DB file within the container
# DB_SQLITE_FILE: "/data/database.sqlite"
# Uncomment this if IPv6 is not enabled on your host
# DISABLE_IPV6: 'true'
volumes:
- ./data:/data
- ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt
networks:
dockerwp:
external: true
Create docker-compose.yml for the MariaDB and the WordPress container (one for the staging and one for the production system)
As I backed up the WordPress blog site with updraft, we are restoring the backup to the new WordPress staging and WordPress production system, respectively.
Configure the Sub-Domains
Go to your DNS provider and configure the new Sub-domains with a CNAME entry.
If you have a dynamic IP address, route the Sub-Domain entries to the same Dynamic DNS entry of your DynDNS Provider.
Configure the NPM
Define the target of the routing for all the Sub-Domains, e.g. the Ports of your WordPress containers.
Let the Sub-Domain for the Home Assistant point to the separate HA RPi3.
Add the SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
Additional configuration for the Home Assistant
We must add the following configuration steps to make the Home Assistant run with an external Sub Domain, based on ademalidurmus.
1.) At the NPM, enter the following entry in the advanced config for the Home Assistant Host.
