WordPress Development

Environments

Josh Cummingsjoshcummingsdesign.com

@jcummingsdesign

Objectives

• What is a development environment?

• What tools exist for creating and configuring a

WordPress development environment?

• What tools exist to help us deploy our code?

Humble Beginnings

Workflow

What is a development

environment?

A collection of procedures and tools

for writing, testing, debugging, and

deploying your code.

What tools do we need

to run WordPress?

LAMP Stack

• Linux

• Apache

• MySQL

• PHP

LEMP Stack

• Linux

• Nginx

• MariaDB

• PHP

The WordPress Stack

Local

Development

Staging

Production

Command Line Tools

• Versioning (Git / SVN)

• WP-CLI

• Task Runners (Gulp / Grunt)

• Dependency Managers (Composer / npm / Bower)

Text Editors / IDEs

• PhpStorm

• Sublime Text

• Atom

Database Clients

• Sequel Pro

• Navicat

What tools exist to help us set

up our local development

environment?

–Terry Pratchett

“If you don't know where you are, then you don't

know where you're going, and if you don't know

where you're going, you're probably going wrong.”

Things to Consider

• Will I be working on a team?

• Will I be developing a theme or plugin, or working on

WordPress core?

• How do I plan on deploying my code?

The “works on mine” issue.

The 3 Month Test

Find the right

tools for the job.

AMP

• XAMPP

• MAMP

• WAMP

MAMP

• Simple to setup

• Little to no configuration needed

MAMP - Pros

• Brittle, tied to specific versions

• Less parity, more coupled

MAMP - Cons

DesktopServer

DesktopServer

• Cross-platform

• Easy to setup

• Blueprints will save you time

• Direct Deploy makes deploying easy

Native Stack

Linux / Mac

• Create an image for your team that has all of the

necessary configuration for your stack

• Leverage scripting for creating new projects and

deploying your code

• Create a custom build of WordPress that you keep in

a git repository which uses composer to track your

plugin dependencies

Linux / Mac

• https://github.com/kiriaze/mac-dev-env

• https://gist.github.com/joshcummingsdesign/0f291b3

f73f1e3113227

• https://wpackagist.org/

Native Stack - Pros

• Lightweight

• Quickly create new projects

• Works really well when your remote servers always

run a similar configuration

• Fast deploys that you can automate

Native Stack - Cons

• More dependencies to manage

• Harder to hand your code over to another developer

unless they have the same build

Virtual Machine

(VM)

Virtual Box

VM - Pros

• Easily create a configure a new server

• Reproduce any environment

• Completely destructible

• Completely decoupled

• Passes the 6 month & “works on mine” tests

VM - Cons

• More overhead

Vagrant

• Cross-platform

• Create a single file for your project to describe the

type of machine you want (provisioning file)

• One command to spin up an environment

• One command to deploy an environment

VVV

• Varying Vagrant Vagrants

• Focused on WordPress development.

• Ideal for developing themes and plugins as well as

for contributing to WordPress core.

VVV

• https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV

• https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/

Trellis

• Developed by the Roots team

• Vagrant LEMP stack for WordPress with modern

development in mind

• Uses the power of Ansible to provision servers and

deploy with a single command

Containers

Docker

Docker containers wrap up a piece of software in a complete

filesystem that contains everything it needs to run: code,

runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything you can

install on a server. This guarantees that it will always run the

same, regardless of the environment it is running in.

Docker

• Docker file

• Builds docker image

• Image sits on top of your machine

• Self-contained processes (microservices)

• Docker Hub

Docker

ContainersVM

Docker

• Modular

• VM-like features with less overhead

• Deploy very quickly because it only updates the new

information (like Git)

Docker for WordPress

• Define the project (YAML)

• Curl WordPress tarball

• Create a wp-config.php

• Run docker-compose up

• Codeship for deployment

Continuous Delivery

• Codeship

• Wercker

• Jenkins

The Future