Deploy the WordPress charm for the first time

The wordpress-k8s charm helps deploy a horizontally scalable WordPress application. This tutorial will walk you through each step to achieve a basic WordPress deployment.

What you’ll need

You will need a working station, e.g., a laptop, with AMD64 architecture. Your working station should have at least 4 CPU cores, 8 GB of RAM, and 50 GB of disk space.

Tip

You can use Multipass to create an isolated environment by running:

multipass launch 24.04 --name charm-tutorial-vm --cpus 4 --memory 8G --disk 50G

This tutorial requires the following software to be installed on your working station (either locally or in the Multipass VM):

  • Juju 3

  • MicroK8s 1.33

Use Concierge to set up Juju and MicroK8s:

sudo snap install --classic concierge
sudo concierge prepare -p microk8s

This first command installs Concierge, and the second command uses Concierge to install and configure Juju and MicroK8s.

For this tutorial, Juju must be bootstrapped to a MicroK8s controller. Concierge should complete this step for you, and you can verify by checking for msg="Bootstrapped Juju" provider=microk8s in the terminal output and by running juju controllers.

If Concierge did not perform the bootstrap, run:

juju bootstrap microk8s tutorial-controller

What you’ll do

  1. Deploy the WordPress K8s charm

  2. Deploy and integrate a database

  3. Get admin credentials

  4. Access the WordPress instance

  5. Clean up the environment

Set up the environment

To be able to work inside the Multipass VM, log in with the following command:

multipass shell charm-tutorial-vm

Note

If you’re working locally, you don’t need to do this step.

To manage resources effectively and to separate this tutorial’s workload from your usual work, create a new model in the MicroK8s controller using the following command:

juju add-model wordpress-tutorial

Deploy the WordPress charm

Start off by deploying the WordPress charm. By default it will deploy the latest stable release of the wordpress-k8s charm.

juju deploy wordpress-k8s

Deploy and integrate database

Deployment of WordPress requires a relational database. The integration with the mysql interface is required by the wordpress-k8s charm and hence, mysql-k8s charm will be used.

The following commands deploy the mysql-k8s charm and integrate it with the wordpress-k8s charm.

juju deploy mysql-k8s --trust
juju integrate wordpress-k8s mysql-k8s:database

The database interface is required since mysql-k8s charm provides multiple compatible interfaces.

Run juju status to see the current status of the deployment. The output should be similar to the following:

Model               Controller          Cloud/Region        Version  SLA          Timestamp
wordpress-tutorial  microk8s-localhost  microk8s/localhost  3.5.3    unsupported  18:48:09Z

App            Version                  Status  Scale  Charm          Channel        Rev  Address         Exposed  Message
mysql-k8s      8.0.37-0ubuntu0.22.04.3  active      1  mysql-k8s      8.0/stable     180  10.152.183.254  no
wordpress-k8s  6.4.3                    active      1  wordpress-k8s  latest/stable   87  10.152.183.56   no

Unit              Workload  Agent  Address       Ports  Message
mysql-k8s/0*      active    idle   10.1.200.163         Primary
wordpress-k8s/0*  active    idle   10.1.200.161

The deployment finishes when the status shows “Active” for both the WordPress and MySQL charms.

Get admin credentials

Now that we have an active deployment, let’s access the WordPress application by accessing the IP of a wordpress-k8s unit. To start managing WordPress as an administrator, you need to get the credentials for the admin account.

By running the get-initial-password action on a wordpress-k8s unit, Juju will read and fetch the admin credentials setup for you. You can use the following command below.

juju run wordpress-k8s/0 get-initial-password

The result should look something similar to the contents below:

Running operation 1 with 1 task
  - task 2 on unit-wordpress-k8s-0

Waiting for task 2...
password: <password>

Password should look something like: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

Note

If you are using Multipass VM for this tutorial, you will need to route the IP from Multipass. To do this first get the IP of the Multipass VM. Outside the Multipass VM run:

multipass info my-juju-vm

The IP you see here will be called <VM_IP> in this example.

Then route:

sudo ip route add <UNIT_IP> via <VM_IP>

You can now access your WordPress application at http://<UNIT_IP>/wp-login.php and log in with the admin username and password from the previous action.

Clean up the environment

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed the WordPress charm, added a database, and accessed the application.

You can clean up your environment by following this guide: Tear down your test environment

Next steps

You achieved a basic deployment of the WordPress charm. If you want to go farther in your deployment or learn more about the charm, check out these pages: