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Serverless WordPress on AWS Lambda

Update 2020/07/29: AWS recently announced EFS support for Lambda, which makes running WordPress in Lambda easier, with fewer limitations. Here’s the new article about how to run WordPress in Lambda using EFS.

There are a few ways to run WordPress “serverless” on AWS. I’m going to talk about running WordPress on Lambda for this article. If you’re interested in how you can run WordPress serverless-ly on Fargate, I’m working on a post about that too.

Keep in mind that while it is possible to do this, it’s not for everyone. It’s probably not for me. Probably not for you. Use at your own risk!

Before we start, there is a core feature of Lambda that make running WordPress in Lambda quite troublesome: Read-only file system. WordPress expects a writable, persistent, local file system. We’ll be using the S3 Uploads plugin by Human Made to handle media uploads. However, core and plugin updates will not work. There’s no workaround for this, so to install / update files, we’ll need to make a new Lambda deployment.

So: let’s go! First, you’ll want to clone my boilerplate repository. I’ve prepared a WordPress installation and a simple glue script to actually boot WordPress.

$ git clone https://github.com/keichan34/wordpress-on-lambda

My plan of attack is: run WordPress in the Lambda function using a PHP custom runtime, make uploads work with S3 instead of the local filesystem, and wire up the database. In the repository above, I’ve configured static assets to be served from S3 as well.

Now, let’s prepare the database. Lambda has two networking modes: public and VPC mode. In public mode, the Lambda has default access to the public internet, but nothing else. In VPC mode, the Lambda is booted inside the VPC, and doesn’t have public internet access by default. Because WordPress requires public internet access we have to either run it in public mode, or run it in VPC mode and prepare a NAT gateway (about $30 to $50 a month, depending on the region). If Lambda runs in public mode, the database must also be publicly accessible — something that is frowned upon from a security standpoint. You should choose the option that fits your risk and price profile. In my case, I’m going with the NAT gateway route.

Now we’ve got the messy stuff out of the way, we’ll have to assemble the Lambda runtime. AWS has an article on their blog detailing how to make a PHP custom runtime, but Stackery provides a batteries-included PHP layer. It includes everything you need to make a PHP application that assumes it’s running in a traditional server environment run in AWS Lambda.

# Replace "km-wordpress-on-lambda-deployment-201906" with something that makes sense for you. It's globally unique, so copying and pasting this will result in an error.
# Make sure you're in the same region as your database!

$ DEPLOY_BUCKET="km-wordpress-on-lambda-deployment-201906"
$ aws s3 mb "s3://$DEPLOY_BUCKET"
$ cd <the directory you cloned the GitHub repository to>

Now, it’s time to install WordPress! We’ll add the WordPress files to the deployment package. As usual, copy wp-config-example.php to wp-config.php. Enter your database details. If you have a hostname that you’re going to use with CloudFront, enter it now. If not, you’ll have to wait until after the CloudFront distribution is created, then try again.

Now, let’s deploy. This will create a new CloudFront distribution and S3 bucket for public assets, so maybe it’s a good time to make a cup of coffee. If you haven’t installed the SAM CLI, do that before the next block.

$ sam package --template-file template.yaml --output-template-file serverless-output.yaml --s3-bucket "$DEPLOY_BUCKET"
$ sam deploy --template-file serverless-output.yaml --stack-name wordpress-on-lambda --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
$ aws s3 sync ./src/php s3://deploy-bucket-XXXXX --exclude "*.php" --exclude "*.ini"

I’ll be using the default CloudFront domain for this demo. If you’re going to be using your own domain, you need to modify the template.yaml file to add the an alias to the CloudFront distribution. Use the following command to show the CloudFront domain name.

$ aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name wordpress-on-lambda | jq '.Stacks[0].Outputs'

OK! Now, you should be able to access the CloudFront URL, and you’ll get redirected to the friendly WordPress installer! If you’ve set up your wp-config.php correctly, the installation should go smoothly.

The site I set up for this post is available here: https://dskhgdbzphjkm.cloudfront.net/

Lessons Learned

This is for almost no-one. I think the only valid use case (in this current form) for running WordPress in AWS Lambda is a site that gets periodic, unpredictable spikes of intense traffic – a use case where Lambda’s scalability and price model pays off. This is also a use case where, presumably, the benefits of the scalability trumps the inconvenience of not being able to use the online updaters and installers (also, I’m assuming the database will be able to keep up with the load).

However, if updating and installing themes or plugins could be managed outside of the Lambda environment (say, with wp-cli), with deployments automated… Then, it may be a little more applicable to a larger audience.

If you’re looking for a cheap solution to host your personal blog (like me!), you might just want to bite the bullet and check out any of the hosted WordPress solutions out there.

If you liked this post, or you’d like to provide some input, please do so in the comments. My favorite AWS service is Lambda, and I like pushing it a bit, so look forward to similar posts in the future. If you find bugs in the boilerplate, or you can make improvements, please open an issue or PR!

Miscellaneous Tidbits