I am not sure if you realized but the engine that empowers this website is not a static site generator as you may expect. It runs on it own server via WordPress.

I wrote a small theme that I can actually understand and maintain instead of downloading or buying a messy one from the internet, and for now I am happy with it.

I like to do local development when I can and to keep services per project. An easy way to go here is Docker. docker run -d --net host mariadb with some volume mount and here you are.

But for unknown (NixOS) reasons I am not using containers that much those days for local development and I discovered a nice tool called process-compose.

It looks like docker-compose, but it runs processes. It provides an API and a TUI (terminal UI) that is complete and friendly in my opinion. I use this for a few projects written in various languages and I can’t complain, it works!

This is the configuration I quickly put together for this use case:

version: "0.5"
processes:
  wp:
    command: "php -S 0:8080"
    working_dir: "./wordpress"
  mysql:
    command: "mariadbd --defaults-file=./contrib/dev/my.cnf"
    working_dir: "./wordpress"

Since I like to use services per project, I run a local MariaDB dedicated to this specific WordPress installation, so it won’t collide to anything else.