A guide to modern WordPress deployment (part 2)

Recently we published part one in this series on our brand new WordPress deployment platform in which we covered some of the server side technologies that constitute our next-gen WordPress platform.

In part 2 we’ll be briefly covering the toolkit we put together to easily manage the Linux containers that hold individual installations of WordPress.

4. WP-CLI, WordPress on the Command Line

We use the WordPress command line interface to automate everything you would usually have to do in the wp-admin interface. Using WP-CLI removes the inconvenience of logging into a client’s site and clicking around in the WP-admin to perform basic actions like changing option values or adding users.

We’ve been using WP-CLI as part of our install-, backup- and update processes for quite some time now. Quick, simple administration actions, especially when done in bulk is where the command line interface for WordPress really reveals its powers.

Check out the famous 5-minute install compressed into 3 easy lines with the WP-CLI:

wp core download
wp core config --dbname=wordpress --dbuser=dbuser --dbpass=dbpasswd
wp core install --url=https://orange.seravo.fi --title="An Orange Website" --admin=anttiviljami --admin_password=supersecret --admin_email=antti@seravo.fi

5. Git, Modern Version Control for Everything

We love Git and use it for pretty much everything we do! For WordPress, we rely on Git for deployment and development in virtually all our own projects (including this one!).

Our system is built for developers who use Git for deployment. We provide a Bedrock-like environment for an easy WordPress deployment experience and even offer the ability to easily set up identical environments for development and staging.

The main difference between Bedrock and our layout is the naming scheme. We found that it’s better to provide a familiar directory structure for the majority of our clients who may not be familiar with Bedrock, so we didn’t go with the /app and /wp directory naming scheme and instead went with /wp-content and /wordpress to provide a non-confusing separation between the WP core and the application.

└── web
    ├── app
    │   ├── mu-plugins
    │   ├── plugins
    │   └── themes
    ├── wp-config.php
    ├── index.php
    └── wp

└── htdocs
    ├── wp-content
    │   ├── mu-plugins
    │   ├── plugins
    │   └── themes
    ├── wp-config.php
    ├── index.php
    └── wordpress

Our users can easily jump straight into development regardless of whether they want to use modern deployment techniques with dependency management and Git version control, or the straight up old-fashioned way of copying and editing files (which still seems to be the predominant way to do things with WordPress).

6. Composer, Easy Package Management for PHP

As mentioned earlier, our platform is built for Git and the modern WordPress development stack. This includes the use of dependency management with Composer – the package manager for PHP applications.

We treat the WordPress core, language packs, plugins, themes and their dependencies just like any other component in a modern web application. By utilising Composer as the package manager for WordPress, keeping your dependencies up to date and installed becomes just a matter of having the composer.json file included in your repositories. This way you don’t have to include any code from third party plugins or themes in your own repositories.

With Composer, you also have the ability to choose whether to always use the most recent version of a given plugin or a theme, or stay with a version that’s known to work with your site. This can be extremely useful with large WordPress installations that depend on lots of different plugins and dependencies that may sometimes have compatibility issues between versions.

7. Extra: PageSpeed for Nginx

Now, Pagespeed really doesn’t have much to do with managing WordPress or Linux containers. Rather it’s a cutting edge post-processor and cache developed and used by Google that’s free and open source! Since we hadn’t yet officially deployed it on our platform when we published our last article, we’re going to include it here as an extra.

The PageSpeed module for Nginx takes care of a large set of essential website optimisations automat(g)ically. It implements optimisations to entire webpages according to best practices by looking at your application’s output and analysing it. Really useful things like asset minification, concatenation and optimisation are handled by the PageSpeed module, so our users get the best possible experience using our websites.

Here are just some of the things PageSpeed will automatically handle for you:

• Javascript and CSS minification
• Image optimisation
• Combining Javascript and CSS
• Inlining small CSS
• Lazy loading images
• Flattening CSS @imports
• Deferring Javascript
• Moving stylesheets to the head
• Trimming URLs

We’re really excited about introducing the power of PageSpeed to our client sites and will be posting more about the benefits of using the Nginx PageSpeed module with WordPress in the near future. The results so far have been simply amazing.

More information

More information for Finnish-speaking readers available at wordpress-palvelu.fi.

Please feel free to ask us about our WordPress platform via email at wordpress@seravo.fi or in the comment section below.