A toolkit for creating professional WordPress deployments.
Commissioned by Knewton.
WordPress runs professional sites. You should have a professional deployment to go along with it. You should be using:
- Version control (like Git)
- A code deployment system (like Capistrano)
- A staging environment to test changes before they go live
- CDN for static assets
Additionally, you should be able to easily scale out to multiple web servers, if needed.
WP Stack is a toolkit that helps you do all that.
"Must-use" plugins aka mu-plugins
are WordPress plugins that are dropped into the {WordPress content dir}/mu-plugins/
directory. They are autoloaded — no need to activate them. WP Stack comes with a number of these plugins for your use:
wp-stack-cdn.php
This is a very simple CDN plugin. Simply configure the constant WP_STACK_CDN_DOMAIN
in your wp-config.php
or hook in and override the wp_stack_cdn_domain
option. Provide a domain name only, like static.example.com
. The plugin will look for static file URLs on your domain and repoint them to the CDN domain.
wp-stack-ms-uploads.php
The way WordPress Multisite serves uploads is not ideal. It streams them through a PHP file. Professional sites should not do this. This plugin allows one nginx rewrite rule to handle all uploads, eliminating the need for PHP streaming. It uses the following URL scheme for uploads: {scheme}://{domain}/wp-files/{blog_id}/
. By inserting the $blog_id
, one rewrite rule can make sure file requests go to the correct blog.
Note: You will need to implement this Nginx rewrite rule for this to work:
rewrite ^/wp-files/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ /wp-content/blogs.dir/$1/files/$2;
Normally, WordPress redirects /wp-admin/
requests to the WordPress database upgrade screen. On large sites, or sites with a lot of active authors, this may not be desired. This drop-in prevents the automatic redirect and instead lets you manually go to /wp-admin/upgrade.php
to upgrade a site.
Capistrano is a code deployment tool. When you have code that is ready to go "live", this is what does it.
- Create a
deploy
user on your system (Ubuntu:addgroup deploy; adduser --system --shell /bin/bash --ingroup deploy --disabled-password --home /home/deploy deploy
). - Create an SSH key for
deploy
, make sure it can SSH to all of your web servers, and make sure it can pull down your site repo code.- Switch to the deploy user (
su deploy
). ssh-keygen
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
- Add the contents of
~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
to~/.ssh/authorized_keys
on every server you're deploying to.
- Switch to the deploy user (
- Install RubyGems.
- Install Capistrano and friends:
sudo gem install capistrano capistrano-ext railsless-deploy
- Switch to the deploy user (
su deploy
) and check out WP Stack somewhere on your server:git clone git@github.com:markjaquith/WP-Stack.git ~/deploy
- Customize and rename
config/SAMPLE.{config|production|staging}.rb
- Make sure your
:deploy_to
path exists and is owned by the deploy user:chown -R deploy:deploy /path/to/your/deployment
- Run
cap deploy:setup
(from your WP Stack directory) to setup the initialshared
andreleases
directories.
- Switch to the deploy user:
su deploy
cd
to the WP Stack directory.- Run
cap production deploy
(to deploy to staging, usecap staging deploy
)
- Switch to the deploy user:
su deploy
cd
to the WP Stack directory.- Run
cap deploy:rollback
There are two "stages": production and staging. These can be completely different servers, or different paths on the same set of servers.
To sync from production to staging (DB and files), run cap staging db:sync
.
If you're not using WordPress Skeleton, you should be aware of these assumptions:
- Your
wp-config.php
file exists in your web root. So put it there. - WP Stack replaces the following "stubs":
%%DB_NAME%%
— Database name.%%DB_HOST%%
— Database host.%%DB_USER%%
— Database username.%%DB_PASSWORD%%
— Database password.%%WP_STAGE%%
– will beproduction
orstaging
after deploy.
- WP Stack uses the constants
WP_STAGE
(which should be set to'%%WP_STAGE%%'
) andSTAGING_DOMAIN
, which should be set to the domain you want to use for staging (something likestaging.example.com
).