Wordpress Automated Deployment to WPEngine

!! Contributions are welcome

Contents

• Requirements
• Features
• Setup
• Deployments

Requirements:

• Docker: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/
• SourceTree: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
• SSH Setup to connect to WPEngine: https://wpengine.com/support/ssh-gateway/

Features:

• Containerized Docker build.
• Separate docker services for Wordpress (wordpress), MySQL database (db), phpMyAdmin (pma), NGINX (nginx). Additionally, a container for mysql-tunnel to connect to external database.
• Ability to run this code with either local database, or directly connected to external database on your wpengine instance.
• Automated deployment to Development, Staging and Production.

Setup:

1. Get Repository
2. Run Options
3. Start up Docker

1. Get Repository and Upload to BitBucket

Download this repository and upload on your BitBucket account. Create 3 branches:

 1. release/development
 2. release/staging
 3. release/production

You can name these branches however you like, the caveat is that bitbucket-pipelines.yml must be modified correspondingly for automated deployments. Finally, clone in SourceTree.

Put your wordpress website in wordpress folder. Make sure you do not delete any existing files.

You will need to edit a bunch of files to update your wpengine environment names. Namely these three variables: WPEENVNAMEDEV, WPEENVNAMESTAG, WPEENVNAMEPROD, for development, staging, and production wpengine environment names respectively. Files that must be edited:

1. bitbucket-pipelines.yml
2. scripts in migration folder
3. get_uploads.sh
4. send_uploads.sh
5. pull_db.sh

For NGINX, you will need to generate local certificates and trust them. Use the create-cert.sh and trust-cert.sh scripts in certificate_scripts folder.

---> Important: Get Uploads

Run ./get_uploads.sh to sync wp-content/uploads folder from your wpengine dev server to your local repository. (Don't forget to chmod +x get_uploads.sh the first time only). Note: Run this script everytime you take a new pull from remote repository.

2. Run Options

There are two main run options:

1. Run with database container and database deployed locally (also includes phpMyAdmin container), we will call it with-local-db for the remainder of this document.

2. Run with only wordpress container, connected to external development database. Let's call this one with-external-db. Note that if you use this option, you will be directly modifying the external db on your wpengine environment. Use with caution.

Fire up the Terminal. Move to repository folder.

cd /path/to/repository

Option 1: with-local-db:

1. Rename docker-compose-local.yml file to docker-compose.yml.
2. Rename wp-config-local.php file to wp-config.php in wordpress folder.

cp docker-compose-local.yml docker-compose.yml
cd wordpress # Go inside wordpress folder
cp wp-config-local.php wp-config.php
cd .. # Go back to repository root

Protip: You can copy paste this entire block in terminal and it will run each command. Just press enter afterwards.

Option 2: with-external-db:

1. Rename docker-compose-external.yml file to docker-compose.yml.
2. Rename wp-config-external.php file to wp-config.php in wordpress folder.

cp docker-compose-external.yml docker-compose.yml
cd wordpress # Go inside wordpress folder
cp wp-config-external.php wp-config.php
cd .. # Go back to repository root

Protip: You can copy paste this entire block in terminal and it will run each command. Just press enter afterwards.

3. Start up Docker

Note: All commands must be executed when you have run cd to repository directory.

Initialization

----> Skip this step if you're using the with-external-db option. Pull latest database

./pull_db.sh

To make things easier for next time, set an alias:

alias pulldb=./pull_db.sh

So instead of writing ./pull_db.sh, simply execute pulldb command.

If the script doesn't execute: chmod +x pull_db.sh to tell your OS it's an executable file.

Running containers

Build the images and run the containers.

docker-compose up --build

or if you want to run it in detached (background) mode:

docker-compose up -d --build

Make sure all containers are running:

docker-compose ps

wordpress  
pma                                                  
db

Wordpress available at: http://localhost. phpMyAdmin available at: http://localhost:8080. For external option, there should be no db or pma container so you will only see wordpress running.

Running on different ports You can change the default ports in docker-compose.yml file. For example, 8080:80 describes local_port:container_port. You only need to change the first port to change your localhost port.

Want to reset everything?

docker-compose down -v
docker-compose up --build

Finally, test that everything works by going to http://localhost/wp-admin and entering your username/password that you have on wpengine development environment.

Deployments:

• 1. Development
• 2. Staging
• 3. Production

1. Development

1. Merge/Commit code to release/development branch to trigger automated deployment of code.
2. Run ./send_uploads.sh to sync local uploads folder to wpengine development environment.
3. Test if everything is working correctly.

---> Migrating Database

1. Check the scripts under database-versioning.
2. Manually run whichever scripts need to be run through phpMyAdmin on development environment.

2. Staging

• Merge code of release/development branch to release/staging to trigger automated deployment of code.
  1. You can do this by going to release/development branch.
  2. Click on Merge
  3. Select source as release/development.
  4. Select destination as release/staging.
• Manually upload what needs to be uploaded to wp-content/uploads folder from development to staging through sftp.
• Test if everything is working correctly.

3. Production

• Merge code of release/staging branch to release/production to trigger automated deployment of code.
  1. You can do this by going to release/staging branch.
  2. Click on Merge
  3. Select source as release/staging.
  4. Select destination as release/production.
• Manually upload what needs to be uploaded to wp-content/uploads folder from staging to production through sftp.
• Test if everything is working correctly.