WordPress VIP Site Template

Site setup, development environment and deploy tooling for WordPress VIP:

• Uses Composer for adding project dependencies, including plugins and themes.
• Uses Composer autoloader for using any of the popular PHP packages anywhere in the codebase.
• Includes a local development environment based on Docker with support for PHP Xdebug and a mail catcher.
• Includes automated build and deploy pipelines to WordPress VIP Go using Travis CI or GitHub Actions.

Links & Resources

• VIP Go dashboard
• VIP Go documentation
• NewRelic dashboard

Requirements

• PHP 8.2
• Composer
• Node.js version 18
• Docker with Docker Compose
• rsync for deployments

Install Dependencies

We suggest using Homebrew on macOS or Chocolatey for Windows to install the project dependencies.

brew install git [email protected] composer node@18 mkcert nss
brew install --cask docker

Code Editor and Git Client

This repository includes a list of suggested extensions for the Visual Studio Code editor and Xdebug support in the .vscode directory.

A user-friendly Git client such as GitHub Desktop or Tower enables smaller commits and simplifies merge conflict resolution.

Overview

• Project plugins and themes can be added as Composer dependencies or manualy to this repository under plugins/your-plugin and themes/your-theme.
• Composer dependencies are placed under plugins/vendor since it has to be in the same location relative to the project root (which is not the case for vip-config which is mapped to the WP root directory on the server).
• Composer autoloader plugins/vendor/autoload.php is included in vip-config/vip-config.php.

Initial Setup

Important: This section can be deleted once you've completed the initial setup from the VIP Go Site template.

The site project generated from this template is designed to be hosted under the WP VIP GitHub organization which is why it uses Travis for deployments since VIP repositories currently don't support GitHub actions. It also includes a GitHub Action based workflow which can be used for projects hosted under any GitHub organization that does support GitHub Actions.

VIP Platform Configuration

The following configuration must be requested from VIP Go to use this site repository:

1. Deployments from *-built branches such as master-built and develop-built.
2. Staging environment tracking the develop-built branch.

VIP Repository Setup

1. Ensure that VIP has configured the site to deploy from the *-built branches.

2. Create a fresh local Git repository from this reference repository:

    composer create-project xwp/vip-site-template --stability dev
   

3. Add your theme and plugins as Composer dependencies:

    composer require your/theme your/plugin another/plugin
   

   or by manually copying them to themes or plugins. Remember to start tracking those directories by excluding them in themes/.gitignore and plugins/.gitignore.

4. Adjust strings and URLs in all files match your project. Search and replace the following strings: xwp/vip-site-template, wpcomvip/devgo-vip, XWP\Vip_Site_Template, local.wpenv.net.

5. If hosting this source repository under the VIP GitHub organization, add the VIP Go upstream repository as another remote to this repository locally and force-push the current master to that upstream repository to override the master branch with this. Do the same for the develop branch.

   For hosting this source repository under any other GitHub organization, simply push it to that repository.

6. Generate a fresh SSH key pair and add the private part to the Travis CI configuration or as a DEPLOY_SSH_KEY GitHub Actions secret, and the public part as the Deploy key to the VIP GitHub repository.

    ssh-keygen -f deploy-key -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]"
   

   This provides Travis CI or GitHub Actions with access to the VIP repository for deployments.

7. Remove references to either Travis CI or GitHub actions from this README depending on which deploy strategy was selected.

8. Remove these initial setup instructions from the README after the initial project setup.

Consider using a dedicated GitHub machine user for deployments in case the deploy logic requires access to multiple private GitHub repositories as there can be only one custom key associated with the Travis CI repository and GitHub doesn't allow sharing the same deploy key accross multiple repositories.

Setup 🛠

1. Clone this repository:

    git clone [email protected]:xwp/vip-site-template.git devgo-vip
   

2. Move into the project directory:

    cd devgo-vip
   

3. Install the project dependencies:

    npm install
   

4. Install ssl certificate to add the certificate authority of the development environment local/data/mkcert/rootCA.pem to the trusted list on your computer. Alternatively, configure it manually.

   npm run install-cert

5. Start the development environment using Docker:

    npm run start
   

   and npm run stop to stop the virtual environment at any time. Run npm run start-debug to start the environment in debug mode where all output from containers is displayed. Run npm run stop-all to stop all active Docker containers in case you're running into port conflicts.

6. Install the local WordPress multisite environment:

    npm run setup
   

   with the configuration from local/public/wp-cli.yml.

7. Visit local.wpenv.net to view the development environment. WordPress username devgo and password devgo.

8. Visit mail.local.wpenv.net to view all emails sent by WordPress.

The local development environment uses a self-signed SSL sertificate for HTTPS so the "Your connection is not private" error can be ignored to visit the site.

Resolving Port Conflicts

Docker engine shares the networking interface with the host computer so all the ports used by the containers need to be free and unused by any other services such as a DNS resolver on port 53, MySQL service on port 3306 or another web server running on port 80.

Use the included npm run stop-all command to stop all containers running Docker containers on the host machine. Alternativelly, you can adjust the port mappings in docker-compose.yml to expose different ports on the host machine.

Contribute

1. Setup the local environment environment as described in the "Setup" section above.

2. Create a Git branch such as feature/name or fix/vertical-scroll when you start working on a feature or a bug fix. Commit your work to that branch until it's ready for quality assurance and testing.

3. Open a pull request from your feature branch to the develop branch or the staging environment.

4. Review any feedback from the automated checks. Note that your local environment is configured to automatically check for any issues before each commit so there should be very few issues if you commit early and often.

5. Merge the feature branch into develop on GitHub if all check pass. The automated Travis CI workflow (see the "Deployments" section below for details) or GitHub Actions workflow will deploy it to the develop-built branch.

6. Test your feature on the VIP Go staging server. Open a new pull request from the same feature branch to develop if any fixes or changes are necessary.

7. Once the feature is ready for production, open a new pull request from the same feature branch to the master branch.

8. Ensure that all automated checks pass and merge in the pull request. The automated Travis CI workflow or GitHub Action workflow will deploy it to the master-built branch.

Plugins and Themes

Add new themes and plugins as Composer dependencies:

composer require your/theme your/plugin another/plugin

or manually copy them to themes, plugins or client-mu-plugins directories. Remember to start tracking the directories copied manually by excluding them from being ignored in themes/.gitignore and plugins/.gitignore.

Use client-mu-plugins/plugin-loader.php to force-enable certain plugins.

To update plugins and themes added as Composer dependencies, use composer install package/name or composer install --dev package/name where package/name is the name of the plugin or theme package. Be sure to commit the updated composer.json with composer.lock to the GitHub repository.

For manually installed plugins and themes replace the directory with the updated set of files and commit them to the GitHub repository.

Local Development Environment

We use Docker containers to replicate the VIP Go production environment with all VIP dependencies added as Composer packages and mapped to specific directories inside the containers as defined in docker-compose.yml.

Requests to port 80 of the container host are captured by an Nginx proxy container that routes all requests to the necessary service container based on the HTTP host name.

Importing and Exporting Data

Use VIP dashboard or VIP-CLI to download the database data from the production environment.

• Run npm run vip -- export sql --output=local/public/wp/vip-export.sql to download the latest available backup to your local computer.

• Run npm run cli -- wp db export to export and backup the database of your local development environment which will place a file like wordpress-2020-03-04-448b132.sql in the local/public/wp directory.

• Run npm run cli -- wp db import vip-export.sql to import local/public/wp/vip-export.sql into your local development environment.

• Run npm run cli -- bash -c "pv import.sql | wp db query" to import a large database file local/public/wp/vip-export.sql while monitoring the progress with pv which is bundled with the WordPress container. The bash -c prefix allows us to run multiple commands inside the container without affecting the main npm run cli command.

Scripts 🧰

We use npm as the canonical task runner for things like linting files and creating release bundles. Composer scripts (defined in composer.json) are used only for PHP related tasks and they have a wrapper npm script in package.json for consistency with the rest of the registered tasks.

• npm run start and npm run stop to start and stop the local development environment. Run npm run start-debug to start the environment in debug mode where all output from containers is displayed. Run npm run stop-all to stop all active Docker containers in case you're running into port conflicts. Run npm run stop -- --volumes to stop the project containers and delete the database data volume.

• npm run lint to check source code against the defined coding standards.

• npm run cli -- wp help where wp help is any command to run inside the WordPress docker container. For example, run npm run cli -- wp plugin list to list all of the available plugins or npm run cli -- composer update to update the Composer dependencies using the PHP binary in the container instead of your host machine. Run npm run cli -- wp user create devgo [email protected] --role=administrator --user_pass=devgo to create a new administrator user with devgo as username and password.

• npm run vip to run VIP CLI commands on staging and production environments.

• npm run install-cert to mark the self-signed SSL certificate authority (under local/certs/rootCA.pem) for the local development environment as trusted. Make sure mkcert is installed on your computer. This command is required to avoid the "Your connection is not private" error when visiting the site. Stop the local environment before running this command and restart the browser/tab after installing the certificate and starting the environment again.

Deployments 🚀

The deployment process always starts from the same clean state which enables reproducable builds accross different environments such as local development machines and continuous integration services.

Deployments to the VIP upstream repository are handled automatically by the Travis CI build process or GitHub Actions workflow after a feature branch is merged into master for production or develop for staging.

The CI process checks the code against the VIP coding standards, builds the release bundle and pushes the changes to the master-built branch for production or develop-built for staging deployment.

┌──────────┐   ┌───────────────────────────┐   ┌────────────────┐
│  master  ├──►│  Travis / GitHub Actions  ├──►│  master-built  │
└──────────┘   └───────────────────────────┘   └────────────────┘

Internally it runs the local/scripts/deploy.sh script which does a clean checkout of the deploy source branch to local/deploy/src, runs the build process and copies the project files with the release artifects to deploy/dist using rsync. It then commits the changes to the matching *-built branch which is then imported by the VIP Go servers.

NewRelic Deploy Markers

The repository includes support for publishing NewRelic deployment markers after each deploy, if the NEW_RELIC_API_KEY key is configured in the Travis CI or GitHub Actions environment. Note that we're not using the official NewRelic deployment marker GitHub action because it is harder to configure for multiple App GUIDs.

npm run newrelic-mark-deploy -- --search "*-production" --api_key "${{ secrets.NEW_RELIC_API_KEY }}" --commit "${{ github.sha }}" --user "${{ github.actor }}" --description "$(git log -1 --pretty=%B)"

where:

• --search is the search term to find the NewRelic app GUIDs by app name. The app names are set to $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']-VIP_GO_APP_ENVIRONMENT in vip-config/vip-config.php so we use a wildcard search for *-VIPENVNAME where VIPENVNAME is the environment name such as staging or production.
• --api_key is the API key to authenticate with New Relic.
• --commit is the commit hash to use for the deployment.
• --user is the user to associate with the deployment.
• --description is the description to use for the deployment.