Deploy the Wordpress charm for the first time

What you’ll do

• Deploy the Wordpress K8s charm
• Deploy and integrate database
• Get admin credentials

The wordpress-k8s charm helps deploy a horizontally scalable WordPress application with ease and also helps operate the charm by liaising with the Canonical Observability Stack (COS). This tutorial will walk you through each step of deployment to get a basic WordPress deployment.

Requirements

• A working station, e.g., a laptop, with amd64 architecture.
• Juju 3 installed and bootstrapped to a MicroK8s controller. You can accomplish this process by using a Multipass VM as outlined in this guide: Set up / Tear down your test environment

For more information about how to install Juju, see Get started with Juju.

Shell into the Multipass VM

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

To be able to work inside the Multipass VM first you need to log in with the following command:

multipass shell my-juju-vm

Add a Juju model for the tutorial

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 Wordpress K8s charm

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.

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

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

juju deploy mysql-k8s --trust
# 'database' interface is required since mysql-k8s charm provides multiple compatible interfaces
juju integrate wordpress-k8s mysql-k8s:database

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

After the database has been configured, you can now 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> # 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 finished the wordpress-k8s tutorial. You can now remove the model environment that you’ve created using the following command.

juju destroy-model wordpress-tutorial --destroy-storage

If you used Multipass, to remove the Multipass instance you created for this tutorial, run the following command outside of the VM.

multipass delete --purge my-juju-vm