ServerlessWP

WordPress hosting is silly.

Get low maintenance and low cost WordPress hosting on Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Lambda.

Stay up-to-date at the ServerlessWP repository: mitchmac/serverlesswp

Quick Deploy

Choose one of the following platforms to deploy your serverless WordPress site:

Vercel (recommended)	Netlify	Serverless Framework (Lambda)
		npm install && serverless deploy
🕑 60 second requests	10 second requests	30 second requests
⎇  automatic branch deploy config	manual branch config	manual branch config
🗲 Fluid compute	single concurrency	single concurrency

Don’t want to run a database server? ServerlessWP experimentally supports SQLite+S3 as a low maintenance alternative.

Project goals

🌴 Maintaining servers for WordPress can be a pain. Serverless hosting should make it less time consuming.

💲 Small WordPress sites shouldn’t cost much to host. Vercel, Netlify, & AWS have free tiers.

🔓 WordPress plugins and themes are extensively supported. No arbitrary limitations here.

⚡ Blazing fast websites that take advantage of caching and Content Delivery Networks.

🌎 Mindful consideration of the carbon footprint of WordPress websites.

🤝 A helpful community. Share your successes, ideas, or struggles in the discussions.

Deploy ServerlessWP

This is currently an experimental project.

It’s probably a good fit for development/experimentation, personal blogs, documentation sites, and small business sites. It shouldn’t be used when considerable security or stability is required, yet.

1. Deploy this repository to Vercel, Netlify, or AWS.

One of the links above will get you started. You’ll just need a GitHub account.

2. Select a database solution.

WordPress usually runs with a MySQL (or MariaDB) database. That means hosting a database that runs 24/7.

A SQLite database option has been developed by members of the WordPress community. With the recent ability to conditionally write to S3-compatible object storage a decentralized and serverless data layer for ServerlessWP is possible.

Check out the diagram of the SQLite+S3 logic if you’re interested in how it works.

ServerlessWP supports both SQLite+S3 and MySQL as database options. Some of the trade-offs:

SQLite+S3	MySQL
🕑 on demand	24/7 hosting
💲 usage based (free tiers)	monthly fees (some limited free tiers)
🧩 some plugin incompatibility	full plugin compatibility
♾️ limited database update concurrency	few concurrency limitations
✔️ blogs, dev sites, documentation, single editor sites	any site

The main trade-off of using SQLite+S3 with ServerlessWP is:

• if requests are handled by multiple underlying serverless functions at the same time and make a change to the database, the competing requests may fail. Sites with multiple editors working at the same time or receiving many form submissions aren’t a great fit for SQLite+S3.

3. Update the environment variables.

After selecting your database solution you’ll need to update environment variables for your project with the S3 or database credentials. The WordPress config file wp-config.php is automatically configured to use these values to connect to the database.

If using SQLite and S3 you’ll need to create a private S3 bucket and get access credentials it.

If using a MySQL or MariaDB database you’ll need to setup a database and make sure it can be accessed by outside servers remotely.

Update the environment variables (choose one):

SQLite+S3	MySQL
SQLITE_S3_BUCKET the bucket name you created	DATABASE the database name you created
SQLITE_S3_API_KEY the API key to access the bucket	USERNAME the database user to access the database
SQLITE_S3_API_SECRET the API secret key to access the bucket	PASSWORD the database user’s password
SQLITE_S3_REGION the region where the bucket lives. Create it near your serverless functions	HOST the address to access the database
SQLITE_S3_ENDPOINT optional: to update where the bucket is, like a Cloudflare R2 address	TABLE_PREFIX optional: to use a prefix on the database tables

See here for Vercel and here for Netlify for more about managing environment variables. Remember to redeploy your project after updating the environment variables if you update them after initially deploying your project.

4. File and media uploads with S3 (optional, can be done later)

File and media uploads can be enabled using the included WP Offload Media Lite for Amazon S3 plugin. S3 setup details can be found here. The wp-config.php file is setup to use the following environment variables for use by the plugin:

• S3_KEY_ID
• S3_ACCESS_KEY

Customizing WordPress

• WordPress and its files are in the /wp directory. You can add plugins or themes there in their respective directories in wp-content then commit the files to your repository so it will re-deploy.
• Plugins like Cache-Control can enable CDN caching with the s-maxage directive and make your site super fast. Refer to Vercel Edge Caching or Netlfiy Cache Headers

Customizing ServerlessWP

• netlify.toml or vercel.json are where we configure /api/index.js to handle all requests
• mitchmac/serverlesswp-node is used to run PHP and handle the request
• You can modify the incoming request through the event object in api/index.js. You can also modify the WordPress response object there. ServerlessWP has a basic plugin system to do this. Checkout out /api/index.js for hints.

Getting help

Need help getting ServerlessWP installed? Start a discussion

Contributing

• Using ServerlessWP and reporting any problems you experience is a great way to help.
• Spread the word!

License

GNU General Public License v3.0