In this paper we develop the governing equations of the coupled damage-plasticity model, which is capable of representing the main mechanisms of inelastic behavior including irreversible plastic deformation, change of elastic response and the localized failure. We show in particular how such model should be implemented within the stress-based variational formulation, providing an important advantage for local computation of the internal variables, which thus remains very robust and even non-iterative for the case of linear hardening model. Several simple examples are presented in order to illustrate the kind of response the model can represent.