westerndeal / wordpress-playground

Run WordPress in the browser thanks to WebAssembly magic

WordPress Playground

Project Page | Live demo | Documentation and API Reference

WordPress Playground is an experimental in-browser WordPress that runs without a PHP server thanks to the magic of WebAssembly.

Why is WordPress Playground useful?

WordPress Playground is a building block that can power apps like:

• Runnable code snippets in your documentation or course
• Plugin and theme demos in a private WordPress instance where the user is already logged in as an admin
• Easily switching PHP and WordPress version when testing
• Replaying and fixing the failed CI tests right in the browser

See the WordPress.org announcement post to learn more about the vision.

Getting started

WordPress Playground has a live demo available.

You can embed WordPress Playground in your project via an <iframe> – find out how in the documentation. Note the embed is experimental and may break or change without a warning.

You also can run WordPress Playground locally as follows:

git clone https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-playground
cd wordpress-playground
npm install
npm run dev

A browser should open and take you to your very own client-side WordPress at http://127.0.0.1:8777/wordpress.html!

From here, the documentation will help you learn how WordPress Playground works and how to use it to build amazing things!

Backwards compatibility

This experimental software may break or change without a warning. Releasing a stable API is an important future milestone that will be reached once the codebase is mature enough.

Prior art

WordPress Playground forked the original PHP to WebAssembly build published in https://github.com/oraoto/pib and modified later in https://github.com/seanmorris/php-wasm.

Another strong inspiration was the Drupal in the browser demo which proved you can run non-trivial PHP software in the browser.

A worthy mention is Wasm Labs’s closed-source WordPress in the browser shared before this project was first published. There is no public repository available, but their technical overview gives a breakdown of the technical decisions that project took. WordPress Playground draws inspiration from the same PHP in the browser projects and makes similar technical choices.

Contributing

WordPress Playground is an ambitious project in its early days. If the feature you need is missing, you are more than welcome to start a discussion, open an issue, and even propose a Pull Request to implement it.