A modern WordPress development workflow

A modern WordPress
development workflow
By David Darke
1 A modern WordPress development workflow - David Darke | atomicsmash.co.uk

September 2010

FTP :(

What's wrong with this simple setup?
• It's almost impossible for two developer to work at the same time,
(unless they are sat next to each other)
• Dropbox does have a revision system, but only on a per file basis
• Deployments were cumbersome and not traceable (FTP is the worst)
• No real control over servers and hosting (Shared hosting)
• Nothing was re-usable
• Hours (maybe days) wasted handling development environment
differences and things out of our control

Today (April 2018)

Our challenges
• Get a shared development environment - Hoping to increase
development team
• Improve frontend workflow - Stop editing flat CSS files
• Find a reliable deployment method - Stop f***ing about with FTP
• Improve hosting reliability - Increase level of control and
performance
• A future goal of...

Automated continuous delivery

Think of your
WordPress website,
as a web platform.

Laravel Homestead
+

Laravel Homestead
Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant box that
provides you a wonderful development environment without
requiring you to install PHP, a web server, and any other server
software on your local machine.
— Homestead documentation

The anatomy of 99% of WordPress Websites
= ++ +
Open source
code
Your theme and
custom plugin
code
Database Uploads

Your theme code
= ++ +
Open source
code
Your theme and
custom plugin
code
Database Uploads

Get your custom code into GIT...

Get your custom code into GIT...
NOW!!!

'Please use git' - A post by Amin Shah Gilani 1
• It’s too complicated
• I’m not too good with the command line.
• “Our project is too small”
• “Our team is too small”
• “We use Dropbox”
1
https://hackernoon.com/please-use-git-da3bea7d1234

= ++ +
Open source
code
Your theme and
custom plugin
code
Database Uploads

We use shared remote databases
mysql.mycompany.co.uk
This means all our development databases are accessible from
anywhere.
• No syncing
• Content is shared between developers
• Wordpress locking stops two people editing the same content at the
same time

= ++ +
Open source
code
Your theme and
custom plugin
code
Database Uploads

We store development uploads on
Amazon S3
An S3 bucket per site, which is only accessible to the development
team

= ++ +
Open source
code
Your theme and
custom plugin
code
Database Uploads

Composer pulls a WordPress version (usually the latest) and all
required plugins. 2
2
https://www.atomicsmash.co.uk/blog/using-composer-wordpress-development/

Git repository doesn't include WordPress, plugins or uploads

Our challenges
• Get a shared development environment ✔
• Improve frontend workflow
• Find a reliable deployment method
• Improve hosting reliability

More about frontend tools 3
3
https://www.atomicsmash.co.uk/blog/our-current-development-tools-and-workflows/

Our challenges
• Improve frontend workflow ✔
• Find a reliable deployment method

Capistrano

A single deployment
1. Developer runs cap production deploy
2. Capistrano logs into your remote server
3. Capistrano grabs the latest code from Git
4. Capistrano runs composer and pulls down WordPress
5. If there are no errors in setup, Capistrano puts changes live

cap production deploy
cap uat deploy
cap staging deploy

cap production deploy:rollback

Our challenges
• Improve frontend workflow ✔
• Find a reliable deployment method ✔

The hosting company

Hosting provisioning

Forge...
1. It creates the server on Digital Ocean
2. Installs Nginx, PHP, MySQL + a bunch of other stuff
3. Helps automate FREE Let's Encrypt SSLs (and normal SSLs)
4. Provides an interface for creating 'sites'
5. Provides an interface for creating databases
6. Patches the servers for security updates (in the background)
7. Admin still has full control over the server

Old dev process
FTP :(

Release Belt
New dev process

Premium plugins with composer
We use an private composer storage solution called Release Belt.
https://github.com/Rarst/release-belt

Server metrics via Prometheus

BONUS!

Signup for logsmith
We are looking for beta testers
http://eepurl.com/dkjmHb

THANKS!
Follow me:
@david_darke
Follow my studio:
@atomicsmash
Get presentation here:
https://github.com/daviddarke/A-modern-WordPress-development-
workflow

Tool list
• Capistrano | Used to deploy code from GIT to servers.
• Composer | Used to pulling PHP dependancies like Wordpress.
• Forge | Used for provisioning servers
• GIT | A version control system for storing and sharing code.
• Logflume | Gets uploads onto S3 so they are sharable with other developers
• Logsmith | The development framework made by Atomic Smash
• Release belt | Used for storing premium plugins and making them privately
accessible to composer.

A modern WordPress development workflow

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