These are my notes, to help remind me what I did….
The goal
Get everything out of the live WordPress install and into a staging directory that Docker can work with. Nothing here touches the live site. It’s all copies.
Create the project directory
mkdir -p ~/wp-docker/db-init ~/wp-docker/wp-content
cd ~/wp-docker
Get the config files in place
I had docker-compose.yml, env.example, and php-uploads.ini on my local machine. Transferred them via scp:
scp * user@173.255.253.123:~/wp-docker/.
Export the database
MySQL 8 requires --no-tablespaces when dumping as a non-root user. First attempt without it errored out. This is the command that worked:
mysqldump --no-tablespaces -u johnny -p wordpress > ~/wp-docker/db-init/site-backup.sql
Copy wp-content
cp -a /var/www/html/johnnycarlos.com/public_html/wp-content/. ~/wp-docker/wp-content/
Cleaned up a stray debug.log that came along:
rm ~/wp-docker/wp-content/debug.log
End state
~/wp-docker/
├── docker-compose.yml
├── env.example
├── php-uploads.ini
├── db-init/
│ └── site-backup.sql
└── wp-content/
├── plugins/
├── themes/
├── uploads/
└── upgrade/