WordPress on .NET SDK

The solution compiles all of WordPress into a .NET assembly and additionally provides C# wrappers for the utilization of the compiled sources. The project consists of several parts:

• wordpress contains the sources of WordPress that are compiled into a single .NET Core assembly (wordpress.dll). Together with its content files it is packed into a NuGet package PeachPied.WordPress. The project additionally contains the "must-use" plugin peachpie-api.php, which exposes the WordPress API to .NET.
• PeachPied.WordPress.Sdk defines an abstraction layer providing .NET interfaces over the PHP WordPress instance. The interface is implemented and provided by peachpie-api.php.
• PeachPied.WordPress.AspNetCore is an ASP.NET Core request handler that configures the ASP.NET pipeline to pass requests to compiled WordPress scripts. The configuration includes response caching, short URL mapping, various .NET enhancements and the settings of the WordPress database.
• The app project is an executable demo ASP.NET Core web server making use of compiled WordPress.

What does this do?

This project contains the complete source code of WordPress with the additional "must use" WordPress plugin that exposes the PHP API to .NET. The purpose is for this code to be compiled by PeachPie, resulting in the output running purely on Microsoft .NET Core.

Therefore, if everything works as it should, you will see the standard unchanged WordPress in the same way as you would in the traditional PHP version. The difference is that the compiled website runs on .NET Core in the background. Also this approach allows to take advantage of ASP.NET Core request handling and makes it possible to extend WordPress with C# (i.e. plugins, themes, etc.).

How does this work?

The PHP sources in wordpress directory are compiled to .NET Core by PeachPie compiler, which is seamlessly downloaded by dotnet itself.

The sample instantiates Kestrel - the open source web server - and the ASP.NET Core pipeline. The pipeline handles requests to PHP files using the PeachPie RequestDelegate by calling the corresponding compiled scripts in wordpress.dll.

Note that the original PHP sources (*.php files) in wordpress are not needed to run the compiled application.

Possible Use Cases

• Improve performance: compiled code is fast and also optimized by the .NET 'JITter' for your actual system. Additionally, the .NET performance profiler may be used to resolve bottlenecks.
• Write plugins in C#: plugin functionality can be implemented in a separate C# project and/or PHP plugins may use .NET libraries. Utilize .NET with all its advantages like sourceless distribution or type safe and compiled code, which is further optimized and checked for the actual platform.
• Integrate WP into a .NET application: drive the WordPress life cycle from a C# app, run within the Kestrel Web Server.
• Sourceless distribution: after the compilation, most of the source files are not needed. Some files contain meta-data (like plugins and themes) and should be kept in the output.
• Take advantage of the .NET runtime: JITted, secure and manageable platform.

Prerequisites

• .NET Core 2.1 or newer
• MySQL server
• Optionally - Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio Code using the official Peachpie for VSCode extension available on the Marketplace

How to run demo app

0. start mysql, at localhost:3306, user root, password password
1. dotnet run -p app