Simplify your WordPress Deployments

Deploying code to WordPress installations has always been a bit of a struggle. Although there are a few WordPress plugins that help in deployments, there hasn't really been a simple WordPress deployment process. It's about time that process became a lot easier.

Let's say we have four WordPress environments for a site we are working on: local, development, staging and production. Each of these environments would use separate databases, and would be accessible from different hostnames. For each of these environments we've got to be able to rollout code, synchronize the database and uploaded files. WordPress makes this slightly more difficult by storing absolute urls of its content in the database. At one of my previous jobs, we attempted to handle deployment of a WordPress site with a very long and confusing php script. It was very complex, contained all of the developers' individual environment details, and was certainly not the most eloquent solution.

Let's make deploying WordPress simple!

By using Capistrano, git, wp-cli and sed we can create a simplifed deployment process. Here's what it will do:

• Set up additional environments by cap staging deploy:setup
• Make deploying code to other environments a snap with cap staging deploy
• Make pulling and pushing the database (and searching and replace those absolute urls) as easy as cap prod db:pull and cap dev db:push
• Handle repository-ignored files (wp-content/uploads, etc) with cap prod files:pull and cap dev files:push

Sounds like a good idea, right? Let's take a look at how this is accomplished. First we've got to handle the wp-config.php file to be used on many environments. This is done by including a file, local-config.php, that will store the local environment's configuration, and is left out of the repository by .gitignore. Also ignored by .gitignore are your wp-content/uploads, wp-content/w3tc, wp-content/avatars, wp-content/cache etc. A directory I created called db/ is also ignored by git. That's where we'll store database dumps that we pulled from a different environment, or want to push to one.

The Capfile does the heavy lifting here. Some of the rails-specific tasks have been disabled here (migrate, migrations, cold, start, stop, restart) and we've added tasks for handling the setup, files, deploy and db. I'll save you the detail of going over the specifics of the capfile. If you are interested, I've provided a sample one you can download at the bottom of this blog post. Wp-CLI is a great tool that is bringing drush-like functionality to WordPress. I'm using it in this deployment strategy to handle database imports and exports on the capistrano targets.

One more area of note would be the config/deploy.rb file. This contains some settings you'd need to set before attempting to deploy anywhere.

When this is all set-up, your development workflow should look like something like: develop locally, commit and push to git, cap deploy to dev/staging, test there, cap deploy to production and ensure production works.

You can checkout what a sample repository would look like here. If you aren't familiar with capistrano and git, you might want to get used to them before attempting to use this codebase for your projects.