mediasanctuary.org

Website for The Sanctuary For Independent Media

Basics

This is a WordPress site, the theme mediasanctuary and the plugins it depends on are managed here.

Developer dependencies

• node.js v16
• Docker Desktop

How to run locally

Start the Docker containers and the asset watcher:

./bin/start

Once it's running, load the website at localhost:8080.

Exiting the start script (ctrl-C) stops the containers.

Syncing content

Before you can sync content from dev.mediasanctuary.org to your local dev site, you will need to make sure your public SSH key is setup on the devmediasan account. Then you can use the following command:

./bin/sync

That script does the following:

1. Export the database
2. Replace URLs in the SQL file
3. Edit the SQL to remove all the WordPress user accounts and revision posts
4. Edit the SQL to a new WordPress account dev with password dev
5. Import that SQL file into your local database
6. rsync the uploads directory

After you finish, your local environment should look pretty much the same as dev.mediasanctuary.org, but you should login with username/password: dev/dev.

Care and maintenance

Rebuild the container if necessary:

docker compose build

Tail the logs:

docker compose logs -f web

Login to a shell on the web server container:

docker compose exec web bash

About the image

The Dockerfile uses the official wordpress image, which in turn is built off of php. The web container uses Debian-style package management. We don't modify it very much, just installing some tools like WP-CLI.

There won't be any database tables setup first time you run the container, but you can install the site by visiting localhost:8080.

You can connect to the MySQL database on port 3307.

Updating plugins

We use WP-CLI to keep the plugin files up-to-date, and commit the changes to source control. Note that updates to the Advanced Custom Fields plugin require that you configure it with a license key.

How to upgrade the plugins:

docker compose exec web wp plugin upgrade --all

Updating WordPress core

To update your local WordPress dev instance:

docker compose exec web wp core upgrade

Updating WordPress on the dev or prod servers requires that you SSH in and run wp core upgrade on the server.

Installing new plugins

Plugin files are stored in source control. The way to install a new one is to install it locally, commit the files, then update the servers.

docker compose exec web wp plugin install [new plugin]

Continuous integration

We use GitHub Actions to deploy updates to the servers.

• Commits to the main branch end up getting deployed to https://dev.mediasanctuary.org/
• Commits to the production branch end up getting deployed to https://www.mediasanctuary.org/