A Bitnami WordPress stack installation and examination
I was in search of some real-world examples of one-to-one and one-to-many table mappings as I worked on some recent Hibernate and JPA tutorials. The typical, introductory HelloWorld and FooBar examples only go so far when it comes to andragogy. I wanted some examples with a little more meat on them.
That got me thinking about WordPress. I wondered how the world’s largest blogging software set up their persistence layer. Surely there will be some interesting table joins in that database schema, right?
The Bitnami WordPress stack
A developer will need to bring several different software components together to use WordPress. It requires a relational database (MySQL), an HTTP-based web server (Apache), a PHP interpreter and a variety of port and credential settings that are easily misconfigured. As a result, I turned to Bitnami.
Bitnami’s catalog offers a variety of pre-configured software stacks, ranging from Jenkins to Tomcat to Artifactory servers. And yes, there’s a Bitnami WordPress stack as well.
The stacks come in a variety of flavors, including container packaged, virtual machine hosted and a simple installer that loads all the required files on a local operating system. I chose the local option, with a recently reimagined Lenovo T430 laptop at my disposal.
The installation lasted about 10 minutes. When it finished, I had a working Bitnami WordPress stack on my laptop with all the underlying MySQL and Apache Web Server components at the ready for my perusal. It’s always interesting to open a popular software stack and examine how a team of professional software developers and architects have pieced it together.
I plan to focus on some other WordPress-related coming up, such as a bottom-up mapping of the WordPress database to create a dozen JPA entities based on the underlying tables. I’ll also demonstrate how those JPA entities can be used to create a Java WordPress API that allows CRUD operations on blog entries. I’m not sure if a Java and PHP combination is a great idea, but it’s a fun mental gymnastics exercise for an addle mind.
The following video will walk you through the steps to download and install a Bitnami WordPress stack.
Cameron McKenzie is an AWS Certified AI Practitioner, Machine Learning Engineer, Solutions Architect and author of many popular books in the software development and Cloud Computing space. His growing YouTube channel training devs in Java, Spring, AI and ML has well over 30,000 subscribers.