[wp-hackers] WP Development & Production Sites

Fri Nov 19 18:23:48 UTC 2010

Are you doing a Wordpress Multisite or Wordpress site? This helps to understand the difficulty of the task. 

I have released a few of our scripts for doing wp release engineering at Tribune. With Wordpress you have to build for production environment and sync back to dev, not push from dev to production. This is because Wordpress uses PHP serialization dumped straight in the database, it is not normalized. (And really stupid design.)

The easiest way to do this is to have your dev site answer as the production domain and use DNS or hosts entries on development machines to point to the dev site.

So for production server:

www.uni.edu at 123.1.1.1, in DNS

and dev box dev.uni.edu at 122.2.2.2.

You can just set the apache vhost to answer as both dev.uni.edu and www.uni.edu .

just add 122.2.2.2 www.uni.edu  to your hosts file and code away.

My preferred method going forward will probably be a Hudson + Capistrano way of deploying Wordpress. This may be overkill for you (a Java app using Ruby to deploy PHP). If anyone is interested, I may eventually put this in the Codex when the process is flushed out.

Capistrano deploys for Wordpress: https://github.com/jestro/wordpress-capistrano

Jason Potkanski
Release Lead
Tribune Technology, Back-End Support

-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Chris Chilcoat
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2010 10:26 AM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] WP Development & Production Sites

We are going to need to sync the DB, templates and new plug-ins. The dev and
production sites will need to be exact copies of one another.

Chris

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Vid Luther <vid at zippykid.com> wrote:

> plugins and their settings would need to be exported to production? i know
> some themes have the ability to export and import options, but not sure
> about plugins.
> perhaps they're creating custom post types in dev, and then they just need
> the new post type in production?
>
> I'm running into similar issues as well.
>
>
>
> William Davis wrote:
>
>> I certainly understand wanting to sync production data to the development
>> site, but it sounds like he wants to sync his dev site back to his
>> production site.
>>
>> William P. Davis
>> will.davis at gmail.com
>> 207.660.5342
>> http://twitter.com/williampd
>> http://www.wpdavis.com
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 19, 2010, at 11:12 AM, Matthew McGarity wrote:
>>
>>  I don't know his specific reasons, but one reason *I* have would be to
>>> setup
>>> a test environment with production data (posts, pages, categories) so I
>>> can
>>> test new functionality against valid data.  Since his question is limited
>>> to
>>> the DB (and not to files), I don't know what other use might be valid.
>>>
>>> MMc...
>>>
>>> Matthew McGarity
>>> http://mcgarity.me
>>> (972) 275-9673
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 10:10 AM, William Davis <will.davis at gmail.com
>>> >wrote:
>>>
>>>  Just out of curiosity, what changes will you be making to the database
>>>> that
>>>> you'll need to be syncing back?
>>>>
>>>> William P. Davis
>>>> will.davis at gmail.com
>>>> 207.660.5342
>>>> http://twitter.com/williampd
>>>> http://www.wpdavis.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Nov 19, 2010, at 11:09 AM, Iain Cambridge wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Simplest way I suspect would be to MySQL replication which is pretty
>>>>
>>>>> well documented over at mysql.com
>>>>>
>>>>> Iain
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Chris Chilcoat <cchilc01 at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>  Hello:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I am planning on using WordPress 3.0 to power a small university
>>>>>> website.
>>>>>> I
>>>>>> am looking for a way to create a development environment that I can
>>>>>> sync
>>>>>> with a production site. I am trying to avoid exporting the DB from Dev
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> installing on my production box every time I need to make an update.
>>>>>> Dose
>>>>>> anyone know of any software or plug-ins that would help with my
>>>>>> problem?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Christopher C. Chilcoat
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