WPEngine almost has a good guide for this but it’s a little out-of-date formatting-wise and there’s a couple tweaks to make it work tidily for actually doing local development to it.

services:
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: [desired root pass]
      MYSQL_DATABASE: [desired db name]
      MYSQL_USER: [db user for wordpress]
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: [password for wordpress db user]
    platform: linux/amd64 # you may not need this and it's ideal if you don't; I did, though. (linux/amd64 is what you use for M1+ macs, it seems)
  wordpress:
    depends_on:
      - db
    image: wordpress:latest
    ports:
      - "9001:80" # this needs to be in a list or docker will complain. the first port number is what you'll use to navigate to the site on localhost
    restart: always
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: [same db user as above]
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: [same db password as above]
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: [same db as above]
    platform: linux/amd64 # same as above, you may not need this and delete it if you don't
    volumes:
      - [PATH TO YOUR WP-CONTENT FOLDER]:/var/www/html/wp-content
volumes:
  db_data: {}

What we’re doing here is setting up two services—MySql and Wordpress, with some environment variables that will spin up the setup correctly when the images’ deployment scripts are run. Wordpress requires a database to run, so it notes that it depends on “db.”

The main addition I have here over other docker-compose.yml files I’ve seen is that I added the volumes parameter under wordpress, which will set a file path on your computer to be mounted as the container’s wp-content folder. This means that you can easily drop plugins in, manage files, and update themes without having to do things like entering the container via CLI and editing files from that interface. The last part was the confusing piece I had to work out on my own, since as far as I can tell most other guides just don’t mention it?

Anyway, this will create a perfectly serviceable local environment at http://localhost:9001 (or whatever port you chose under the port-mapping section) without having to deal with anything modifying your system PHP paths or anything like that, which is an issue I’ve had with MAMP. Happy development.