docker-compose wordpress mysql connection refused

I’ve created a small docker-compose.yml which used to work like a charm to deploy small WordPress instances. It looks like this:

wordpress:
  image: wordpress:latest
  links:
   - mysql
  ports:
   - "1234:80"
  environment:
    WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
    WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress
    WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: "password"
    WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: mariadb
    MYSQL_PORT_3306_TCP: 3306
  volumes:
    - /srv/wordpress/:/var/www/html/
mysql:
  image: mariadb:latest
  mem_limit: 256m
  container_name: mariadb
  environment:
    MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "password"
    MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
    MYSQL_USER: wordpress
    MYSQL_PASSWORD: "password"
  volumes:
    - /srv/mariadb:/var/lib/mysql

But when I start it now (maybe since docker update to Docker version 1.9.1, build a34a1d5), it fails

Read More
wordpress_1 | Warning: mysqli::mysqli(): (HY000/2002): Connection    refused in - on line 10
wordpress_1 | 
wordpress_1 | MySQL Connection Error: (2002) Connection refused

When I cat /etc/hosts of the wordpress_1 there are entries for MySQL:

172.17.0.10 mysql 12a564fdbc56 mariadb

and I am able to ping the MariaDB server.

When I docker-compose up, WordPress gets installed and after several restarts the MariaDB container prints:

Version: '10.0.22-MariaDB-1~jessie'  socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'  port: 3306  mariadb.org binary distribution

Which schould indicate it to be running, isn’t it?

How do I get the WordPress to be able to connect to the MariaDB container?

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7 comments

  1. To fix this issue the first thing to do is:

    Add the following code to wordpress & database containers (in the docker-compose file):

    restart: unless-stopped
    

    This will make sure you Database is started and intialized before wordpress container trying to connect to it. Then restart docker engine

    sudo restart docker
    

    or (for ubuntu 15+)

    sudo service docker restart 
    

    Here the full configuration that worked for me, to setup wordpress with MariaDB:

    version: '2'
    
    services:
      wordpress:
        image: wordpress:latest
        links:
          - database:mariadb
        environment:
          - WORDPRESS_DB_USER=wordpress
          - WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=mydbname
          - WORDPRESS_TABLE_PREFIX=ab_
          - WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=password
          - WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=mariadb
          - MYSQL_PORT_3306_TCP=3306
        restart: unless-stopped
        ports:
          - "test.dev:80:80"
        working_dir: /var/www/html
        volumes:
         - ./wordpress/:/var/www/html/
      database:
       image: mariadb:latest
       environment:
         - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password
         - MYSQL_DATABASE=mydbname
         - MYSQL_USER=wordpress
         - MYSQL_PASSWORD=password
       restart: unless-stopped
       ports:
         - "3306:3306"
    
  2. The reason for this behaviour probably was related to a recent kernel and docker update. I recognized several other connection issues in other docker-compose setups. Therefore I restarted the server (not just the docker service) and didn’t have had any issues like this ever since.

  3. I had almost same problem, but just restarting the WordPress container saved me:

    $ docker restart wordpress
    

    I hope this help many people.

  4. I too had troubles here. I was using docker-compose to set up multiple wordpress websites on a single (micro) Virtual Private Server, including phpmyadmin and jwilder/nginx-proxy as a controller.

    $ docker logs XXXX will help indicate areas of concern. In my case, the MariaDB databases would keep restarting all the time.

    It turns out that all that stuff just wouldn’t fit on a micro 512M Single CPU service. I never received error messages that told me directly that size was an issue, but after adding things up, I realized that when all the databases were starting up, I was running out of memory. An upgrade to 1Gb, 1 CPU service worked just fine.

  5. I was using your docker-compose.yml, had the same problem. Just restarting didn’t fix. After nearly an hour of researching the logs, I found the problem was: wordpress service started connecting mysql service before it had fully started. Simply adding depends_on won’t help.Docker Compose wait for container X before starting Y

    the work around could be start the db server before Up. When it has fully started, run docker-compose up. Or just use external service.

  6. This simply means you are trying to connect to the wrong host. In order to use this in localhost just use the name of your service as the database host example in your case, it would be mysql you can fix this by specifying the name of the localhost with a default variable like this MYSQL_ROOT_HOST: localhost

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