A Production-Ready WordPress Stack in a Single Click
Panelica now ships a dedicated OpenLiteSpeed WordPress Docker template, pinned to the top of the Application Templates list in Docker Manager. One click provisions a complete, production-grade WordPress environment — web server, object cache, database, and full-page caching — without touching your existing server configuration.
The template is entirely open-source. OpenLiteSpeed is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), and every component in the stack is freely available. There are no licensing costs, no per-site charges, and no proprietary lock-in.
What the Template Includes
The OpenLiteSpeed WordPress template bundles a carefully chosen set of components that work together out of the box:
- OpenLiteSpeed (latest) — An event-driven, asynchronous web server with native HTTP/3 (QUIC) and Brotli compression support. Designed to handle high-concurrency traffic with a low memory footprint.
- LiteSpeed Cache (LSCache) — The full-page caching plugin for WordPress, pre-configured and active from the first request. Dynamic WordPress pages are served from cache without invoking PHP on every hit.
- Redis — A dedicated Redis container pre-wired as the WordPress object cache. Database round-trips for repeated queries are eliminated automatically.
- Selectable PHP runtime — 8.2, 8.3, or 8.4 — All three versions are bundled in the image. You choose the version at deploy time; 8.4 is the default. OPcache and JIT are tuned and enabled out of the box.
- MariaDB — A dedicated database container. Credentials are generated automatically and shown to you after deployment.
- WordPress (latest stable) — Downloaded and installed automatically on first container start. There is no manual setup wizard to click through.
How to Deploy
The entire provisioning process takes a single form submission:
- Open Docker > Application Templates in your Panelica panel.
- Select OpenLiteSpeed WordPress at the top of the list.
- Choose the PHP version — 8.2, 8.3, or 8.4. Leave it at 8.4 if you are not sure.
- Optionally set a site title and admin username. Everything else is handled for you.
- Click Deploy. The database password and WordPress admin password are generated automatically and displayed after deployment completes.
The containers start, WordPress is downloaded and installed, and the site is live — all in one step.
How It Works Under the Hood
Understanding the architecture helps when you need to troubleshoot or extend the setup.
Three Containers, One Isolated Network
The template runs three containers on a dedicated, isolated Docker network:
- Web tier — OpenLiteSpeed serving WordPress via PHP-FPM.
- MariaDB — The database container, reachable inside the network as
mysql. - Redis — The object cache container, reachable as
redis.
The containers communicate over the internal network only. MariaDB and Redis are not exposed to the outside world.
PHP Version Selection
The image bundles PHP 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 simultaneously. The version you select at deploy time is activated at container start. If you need to switch versions later, you can redeploy the template or adjust the environment variable through Docker Manager and restart the container.
Two Layers of Caching, Both Enabled by Default
The stack uses two complementary caching mechanisms:
- Full-page cache (LSCache) — OpenLiteSpeed serves cached HTML directly for anonymous visitors. PHP is not invoked for pages that are already cached, which reduces time-to-first-byte under load.
- Object cache (Redis) — WordPress object cache is backed by the Redis container. Repeated database queries — option lookups, transients, term meta — are served from in-memory storage instead of hitting MariaDB.
Both caching layers are active immediately after deployment. No plugin configuration or manual Redis connection setup is required.
Portable Site URL Handling
The WordPress installation is configured to serve assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) from whatever address and port it is accessed at. You can run the site on a custom port during development and move it to a real domain later — the asset URLs follow automatically. Multiple instances of the template on different ports never collide.
File Isolation: Your Existing Sites Are Not Affected
WordPress files and the MariaDB data directory are stored in dedicated, persistent Docker volumes that are entirely separate from your existing website directories. Your normal public_html folders are not touched. The application lives in its own isolated space and can be removed without leaving residue on your server.
This makes the template safe to deploy on a production server alongside live websites — there is no shared filesystem between the Docker application and your conventionally hosted sites.
Attaching a Real Domain
After deployment, you can route a real domain to the container through Docker Manager > Link Domain. Panelica's front-end web server terminates SSL — including automatic Let's Encrypt certificates — and proxies requests to the container. The WordPress site runs on your domain with HTTPS without any manual Nginx configuration.
The portable URL handling means the switch from a local port to a real domain is seamless: WordPress detects the incoming hostname automatically and serves the correct URLs.
Why OpenLiteSpeed for WordPress
Traditional process-based and thread-based servers consume memory proportional to the number of simultaneous connections. OpenLiteSpeed is event-driven and asynchronous — it handles concurrent connections efficiently while delivering native HTTP/3 support and Brotli compression that most stacks require separate modules or proxies to achieve.
Combined with LSCache full-page caching and Redis object caching, the result is a WordPress stack that performs well on modest hardware and scales predictably as traffic grows — without requiring a CDN or external caching service for the majority of use cases.
Try It Now
The OpenLiteSpeed WordPress template is available now in Panelica under Docker > Application Templates. It requires no additional configuration, no license key, and no modification to your server's existing Nginx or PHP setup.
Panelica is a modern server control panel available in 31 languages, installable in under three minutes on any Ubuntu or Debian server. If you have not tried it yet, visit panelica.com to start a free trial — no credit card required.