docker-compose wordpress mysql connection refused

I had almost same problem, but just restarting the Wordpress container saved me:

$ docker restart wordpress

I hope this help many people.

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.

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"

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.