There are many wonderful tutorials describing in great detail how to set up a horizontally scaled WordPress install in AWS' Elastic Beanstalk - that part is no problem. But I haven't found any follow-up advice yet on how to manage plugin updates after the initial setup, let alone updating wordpress-core itself. Does anybody know the most optimal way to do this?
This is the methodology I'm using so far, but I'm not sure if it is the best way:
Download the plugin's update file and unzip it. Remove and replace the relevant folder in /wp-content/plugins (local git repo)
Run the update in the live site like normal - to ensure that any database changes get pushed up to the RDS
eb deploy from the local repo to commit the file changes and make the update persistent
Is that a sane method? Could anything get corrupted down the line?
For updating wp-core, the tutorials I've read seem overcomplicated - basically rebuild the site from scratch every time an update comes out. Below is what I have been using (used it successfully for WP 5.0.2). Is there any chance of files and databases getting out of sync using this method?
Download and unzip the new wordpress version locally
Replace wp-admin, wp-includes, and the root files except for wp-config.php (local git repo)
Run the update in the live environment, so that any database changes get pushed up to RDS.
eb deploy
I've been running with the above methods for a while and feel pretty confident that they are sound. I only have a couple of tweaks thus far.
The following assumes an environment where there is one staging server outside of the horizontally scaling live environment. This could be further improved for a multi-developer environment using AWS Code Commit.
For Plugins:
Run the plugin update normally on the staging server (in wp-admin). Test everything to make sure the update is sound.
Remove the plugin's old folder from your local git repo and download the updated folder from the staging server using SFTP.
In the local repo, run git add -A && git commit -m "updated Plugin Name" && eb deploy
Run the same update in Live (in wp-admin). It will only apply to one server, but should guarantee that any database changes get pushed up to the single RDS.
Roll out the change to the live environment using the Software Versions page in the AWS Console (in Elastic Beanstalk)
Updating WP Core is almost identical except that instead of removing and replacing a single plugin directory, you will need to remove and replace /wp-admin/, /wp-includes/ and all of the files in the root folder except for wp-config.php
Total newbie question but what is the best practice when it comes to using SSH with Git? I'm working on a WordPress project. In the root I have gulp and other dev files/folders like SASS and Scripts that I don't need on the server and in the same project I have my WordPress folder that contains a theme and a few custom plugins. As you can imagine when the theme or any of the plugins are ready to be deployed I don't want to pull everything in my repository on the server. So far as a newbie I've always just pull and pushed the entire repository and used FTP to upload what I need to the server, so how is this done with SSH and Git and is there a better way to have my setup?
EDIT: To make my question a little bit more clear let me give you an example of what I think my issue is. In my main project folder, I have a SASS folder next to my WordPress folder. All I really need to deploy to the server is the WordPress folder. My build process that happens on my dev machine combines all of the SASS files into a single CSS that is then placed into the WordPress folder. I need the SASS folder to be tracked by Git so that any other developer can pull them and continue developing so I can't have git ignore it. However none of those SASS files need to be on the server for WordPress to work either. I just simply need to deploy the WordPress folder and everything that's in it.
I understand the idea of creating a bare repository on the server and using post-receive hook to point the git folder sitting outside your web root to point to where the web root is. But that's basically how GIT and SSH work and that's not answering my concern.
Not with Git
Git is not designed to pull specific files or directories only. It's a directed acyclic graph with binary blobs as objects and sometimes multiple objects get compacted into a single larger object.
Due to Git design, your specific request is not possible.
Alternatives
post-receive hook
If your website only contains simple static files then it's okay to push to a git repository over SSH. In reality, it's unlikely your repository will be large as long as you don't have non-text files.
Take for example the following setup.
/var/lib/www - apache web dir which is the cloned copy of www.git
/var/lib/www.git - a bare git repository.
/var/lib/www.git/hooks/post-recieve - A server side git hook. It can be a shell script that pulls the www repository when this repository is updated.
Sample post-recieve hook script:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/sam/sandbox/git-hooks/www
unset GIT_DIR
git fetch origin master
git reset --hard origin/master
Zip up build in a tar.gz
At the end of your build you can zip up your files in a tar.gz. This file should be hosted somewhere (perhaps GitHub releases if you're using GitHub). Some enterprises use on premise artifact hosting like Nexus or Artifactory.
The idea being: you have a tested artifact that has a specific sha256sum. The artifact you test is the exact same artifact which eventually goes to production.
Diving into more detail such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and the software development life cycle might be out of scope for your question.
No best practice.
Git is for source control, not for deployment. There is no best practice for using git this way because git is not a deployment tool. You also don't need git history on your server. In fact, you don't need git at all unless you insist on using it for deployment. You are welcome to use it this way but it's not ideal because of exactly the kind of problem you're asking about.
What is the best practice?
There are a number of tools you could use to handle your deployments. Most of the tools generally let you set up a series of steps that let you deploy the code you want into the environment you want. You could go with simple tools such as Phing or Deployer in the PHP world, or something more sophisticated like Puppet or Chef if you have more complex needs. You could just write your own bash scripts if what you need is really very simple. I recommend Phing or Deployer given the info you've provided. https://deployer.org/ https://www.phing.info/
You'll just configure whichever tool you want to ssh into your target box and copy over only the files you want into the directory you want on the server, in whatever way you would like to do that. Usually, you have the script copy files into a temp dir, tarball them up, ssh them over and untar them. After that, you'll usually do some additional work on the server to move files around, change symlinks, whatever else you might need to do.
What about compiled SASS, ES6 js files, or modern static stuff?
All you need to do is add steps to the handle the static files and where you want them to go. Include the generated static files in your tarball when you push stuff up, and put them in the right directories in the server once you untar it.
When you configured your SASS compiler, and whatever other pre-compiled static code you may have - you configured it to create a destination file. That is, the file(s) of actual CSS and JS that they generate. That's all you need to bring along - and if you have the destination directory set to be inside your wordpress theme, you may not even have to pay all that much special attention to it's handling. You may need to move them somewhere else once they are on the server but that all depends on the specific setup in your server, which I think is outside the scope of this question.
Additional Notes:
You didn't ask about this but I thought it was worth mentioning, that you shouldn't be sending the entire wordpress repository every time you update. Just like you don't need the uncompiled SASS code, you also don't need to be repackaging core WordPress. You don't even need to be commiting core WordPress, its a dependency and you don't need to be changing it.
All that should be getting committed by you is your theme and plugin code, and the uncompiled static files. Compiled static files and external dependencies like the WordPress core don't belong in your git history. For deployment purposes, WordPress should already be installed. The stuff in your tarballs should just be plugins and themes, and additional static files if they aren't already in there for some reason.
TLDR;
Don't use git for this. Use a tool like Phing or Deployer. Build your static files into your theme, and create phing/deployer scripts that tarball up only the code you want, SSH's it over to your server, and untars it into the directories you want. If you have some special location on the server for your static files, just make sure to add steps in your script for that.
So, based on your question and comment, there are three computers involved. There is a web server (when you say "server", I take it as a Web server in this scenario, or the server computer that runs a Web server program). There is another server where your git repo is hosted. And, there is your dev workstation. Is this correct?
It seems like, you have a cloned git repo on your Web server. Your current practice/workflow appears to be (1) (based on your expression "SSH'ed into my server") you log into the web server via SSH (just like Telnet) from your workstation (SSH is just a protocol, which can be used for different purposes). (2) you pull from your repo on hosted service (e.g., github), and (3) deploy it to your "www" directory on the same server. Is this correct?
(I can think of an alternative scenario based on your use of the word "FTP", etc., but let's focus on the above scenario, for now.)
Now, your question is, whenever you "pull" (on your Web server), you feel like you are pulling everything from your repo on your hosted service. And, is there a better way? Am I understanding your question correctly?
If so, as another commenter suggested, git (and, any version control system, in general) is very good at fetching "deltas" only. If you are worried about "fetching everything" every time you pull (the step (2) above), then your worry is unfounded.
Now, the question is, why do you have a git repo on your Web server, if that is indeed the case? This is a pretty legit setup and I've done this before (e.g., on EC2). But, as a best practice, people generally don't do that on "production" servers. It's because you have to "build" your web app, and you really don't want to do that on production servers.
The next question is, what do you exactly do in Step (3)? The build process (whatever process you use) typically generates an "output" which can be directly deployed to the web server. (The convention is the output is generally a single folder, "public", "www", "dist", or whatever, or a single file (e.g., tar.gz, zip, jar, war), etc.) Regardless of whether you build the deployable output on your dev workstation (or, a build machine) or on your Web server, you don't generally do "deltas" in this context. Even if you've only changed a single file (say, a CSS file), you generally build the whole output again (instead of, say, just replacing the changed CSS file only). When you use FTP to upload files, etc., you can selectively upload certain files and/or directories, etc., but as a general practice, we don't do that. We always build the complete output from scratch and deploy it to the Web server. (This is mainly to reduce the potential deployment errors and increase the reliability.)
So, to answer your question, (A) If you are pulling git repo on your Web server, you should really change that practice, and move the build process to your dev computer or a dedicated build machine. (BTW, services like github, gitlab, TFS, ... provide the build service for you.) (B) If you are currently selectively FTP'ing your web app files to your Web server, then you should really consider adopting some kind of formal build, and deployment, process moving forward.
After your SASS build process is done use scp or rsync to move the files to the prod server:
scp -r /[local wordpress dir]/wp-content/themes/your-theme/ username#your.prod.server.com:/path/to/dir/wordpress/wp-content/themes/
scp -r /[local wordpress dir]/wp-content/plugins/* username#your.prod.server.com:/path/to/dir/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/
I am working in a project and using git ssh with bitbucket following is the process i am using it may work for you also if not please correct me :
Step 1 ->I have setup git and create repo in bit-bucket.
Step 2 ->And setup project with my local and linked with my repo.
Step 3 ->connect my server using ssh.
Step 4 ->Work in my local and commit and push all changes in my git repo.
Step 5 ->Run git pull on ssh so all changes deployed in my server.
I am using above process and i love this process.i have used .gitignore file that is not required for push on my repo.
Thanks
I want to create a master repository on our server, from which I can clone a local version onto my computer.
I am using R Studio v0.98.994.
So far, this is what I have tried doing:
Create a folder for the master repository to live in. I do this using 'new project' in R studio, and tell it to make a git repository.
I can then open up another new project, located on my C drive, and use R studio to clone, by telling it to open an existing project and setting the URL as the location of the master project.
However, then when I make changes and commit to my local repository (which works fine) I cannot push to the master repository, I get an error exactly as described in this question: git push fails: `refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master`
So it appears that R Studio creates non-bare repositories?
Now I thought, well okay, I will use git bash to initialise the repository and then connect to that within R studio.
I do so, but cannot then find a way to use that repository in R Studio.
I am very new to Git, so it is entirely probable that this is one of those 'read the instructions' questions, in which case I am very sorry - and could someone possibly point me towards some guidance for this situation? I have spent the better half of a day googling around this error and haven't yet managed to pull together the pieces :( I also apologise; this doesn't feel like a very reproducible question.
It sounds like you are using Windows Git, with a setup on a local Windows machine (C: drive) and a server of some kind, mounted as the S: drive. There's a few things you should be aware of when doing this.
Shared Repositories
If you are intending for multiple people to share the same repository, you want to initiate a shared repository. See the --shared option in git-init for more details. Note that I'm not sure how having your repository on a Windows machine affects the sharing options. If you are just trying to keep your repository in two places, that makes things a lot easier.
Bare Repositories
Separate from the discussion of sharing is the discussion of bare repositories. If you don't intend to ever work with files in the server (i.e. it's just going to be a place to push changes so they are safely stored), you could initialize a bare repository. A bare repository contains the database structure of Git, but does not have the actual files in the directory.
A standard Git repository is a directory with a hidden folder in it named .git. This .git folder contains all the various data structures that Git uses to track changes. A bare repository is essentially a folder containing only the contents of .git.
The good thing about a bare repository is that no one can work in the repository itself (since there is no working directory, just the database). This means that no one could log into S: and edit the repository themselves. Instead, they would have to clone the repository, then push their changes back to the origin. The GitGuys have a good article about why this is ideal.
Note that shared repos and bare repos are not dependent or mutually exclusive. As a general practice, if you are having a "server repo" from which you pull and to which you push, you should have it be bare, regardless of whether the project is shared.
A Non-Shared Workflow
Since it's not clear if you are sharing or not sharing and you're on a Windows environment, which I don't know about from a sharing standpoint, I'm going to give you a simple example. Using git-bash, you should be able to change directories to wherever on S: you have your repositories. Then, use git init with the bare options as described by the link above to initialize a bare repository. Navigate to where you want your repository to live on C:, and then do git clone to get a working copy.
Add a README file or something else so you can do your initial commit, and then commit and do git push origin master to push your changes to the S: repository. Once all that is done, THEN initialize the RStudio Git project. RStudio should defer to your existing configuration, and things should hopefully work.
I ran across the VCCW project and despite my unfamiliarity with Vagrant and Chef, decided to give a try. I followed their instructions and obtained the VCCW project itself by installing the GitHub Windows program and cloning the VCCW GitHub master repository. I should also mention that I have very little experience with Git.
Anyway, now I have VCCW Wordpress running on my machine, but I've no clue what to do from here. I wanted to set up a better and more formal Wordpress development environment so I could write my plugin and modify a theme, but I don't know where I should do that. I know where the actual Wordpress installation resides on my file system, so I suppose it would be easy to work from there, but I don't know how (if at all) that interplays with the Vagrant workflow - ie, when it comes time to use Vagrant to deploy my site, will my changes to the "www" folder (which was created by vagrant up) be captured? Somehow I doubt this. Just looking for any help as to how all these fancy new tools work with each other and what a humble PHP developer like myself should do to get started.
Edit: One more question: which IDE, if any, can I use in conjunction with this arrangement? Create a new project from existing sources, and let it pollute my deployment folder with project files?
From the Vagrantfile, it looks like you should look in ./www/wordpress after provisioning.
VCCW includes deployment tool WordMove.
You can deploy WordPress into your server from vccw if you set Movefile.
Movefile will be created automatically after provisioning, so you should add your server configuration in Movefile.
http://vccw.cc/#h2-10
https://github.com/welaika/wordmove
I'm very new to the world of git (done some svn in the past) and would like some advice on trying to accomplish the following.
My current workflow is that I setup the static html files using Middleman to get the base HTML structure and styles before porting over to a Wordpress template. These static files are located at C:/git/project-name/HTMLTemplates.
My wordpress setup uses Xampp so the theme files are kept in C:/Xampp/wordpress/wp-content/themes/project-theme.
What I would like to do is have a single git repo that tracks the changes of the two different locations (HTMLTemplates and project-theme)
Is this at all possible, or do I simply create two individual repos (eg: proect-static and project-wordpress)?
No, there is no mechanism in git for this. Git assumes that all files that it manages (the "working copy") live in a single directory (and subdirectories); there is no support for managing two separate directories in in repo.
So you'll have to somehow keep everything in one directory, probably as subdirectories HTMLTemplates and theme or similar.
You could use two git repos, but I'd strongly advise against this. A single repo should contain a whole "project", i.e. everything needed to build one piece of software (excluding things like external libraries). If you split your project across two repositories, you cannot usefully branch and merge (because you'd have to do it in both repos simultaneously), you cannot easily check out old versions etc..
To solve your problem, I see a few possible solutions:
Have some build / deployment script that copies everything to the right places. You probably alread have a script that invokes Middleman, and possibly tells Wordpress to refresh its cache, so you could add it there.
Set up a symbolic link for the wordpress directory. On UNIX-like systems this is easy and commonly done. On Windows, you can create "junction points", which I believe work similarly.
Configure Wordpress / Apache to read the directory directly from your git working copy. The path should be configurable.
I would prefer the first solution; this has the added advantage that it will decouple your development environment from the server configuration. This will make it easier if your setup later changes or your project needs to run in a different environment (development on a different machine, someone else also wants to work on your project, you want to deploy to a hosted server somewhere etc.).
Note: The problem is, I believe, that your are trying to use git as a deployment tool. While many people do this, git is not really suitable for this purpose. Deployment should usually be a separate step.