WordPress hosting is silly.
Low maintenance and low cost/free WordPress hosting on Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Lambda.
ServerlessWP puts PHP & WordPress in serverless functions. Deploy this repository to give it a try.
Stay up-to-date at the ServerlessWP repository: github.com/mitchmac/serverlesswp
Quick Deploy
(Beta) Try ServerlessWP nearly instantly on Vercel with a temporary SQLite database (database expires after a few days)
Or click one of the options below to deploy your serverless WordPress site with your database of choice:
| Vercel | Netlify |
|---|---|
| 🕑 60 second max request duration | 10 second max request duration |
| ⎇ automatic branch deploy config | manual branch config |
| 📈 Web analytics | paid add-on |
| 🛡️ Firewall | paid add-on |
Want to use AWS Lambda with the Serverless Framework instead? npm install && serverless deploy
Project goals
🌴 WordPress hosting made easy. Lower maintenance with serverless functions instead of servers.
💲 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.
🌎 Lower 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 a good fit for development, 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. Setup a database.
You'll need to create a database for your site's content.
TiDB provides a cloud database with a generous free tier.
Wouldn't it be great to skip hosting a database? Skip below if you want to try something different with SQLite & S3.
3. Update the environment variables.
After creating your database you'll need to update environment variables for your project with the credentials. The WordPress config file wp-config.php is automatically configured to use these values to connect to the database.
Update the environment variables in Vercel/Netlify:
| DATABASE | database name you created |
| USERNAME | database user to access the database |
| PASSWORD | database user's password |
| HOST | address to access the database |
| 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
SQLite + S3 database option
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.
Want to give it a try? Setup a private S3 bucket and use these environment variables:
| SQLite+S3 | |
|---|---|
| SQLITE_S3_BUCKET | bucket name you created |
| SQLITE_S3_API_KEY | API key to access the bucket |
| SQLITE_S3_API_SECRET | API secret key to access the bucket |
| SQLITE_S3_REGION | region where the bucket lives - create it near your serverless functions |
| SQLITE_S3_ENDPOINT | optional: to update where the bucket is, like a Cloudflare R2 address |
Customizing WordPress
- WordPress and its files are in the
/wpdirectory. You can add plugins or themes there in their respective directories inwp-contentthen 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.tomlorvercel.jsonare where we configure/api/index.jsto handle all requests- mitchmac/serverlesswp-node is used to run PHP and handle the request
- You can modify the incoming request through the
eventobject in api/index.js. You can also modify the WordPressresponseobject there. ServerlessWP has a basic plugin system to do this. Checkout out/api/index.jsfor hints.
Getting help
Need help getting ServerlessWP installed? Start a discussion or send me a chat.
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
