9 ms·

WP Engine launches git deployment for WordPress

91 points by dotBen 14y ago

thomasknoll 14y ago
IIRC there are already 70(?) million WP sites, with 45(?) million not hosted on wordpress.com. I wouldn't be surprised if this built in git deployment makes that number grow much more quickly. It sounds like a lot of people already treat WP like a tech stack. So, this could basically be treated like heroku.
- smartbear 14y ago
  Yup, "treating it like Heroku" is exactly our idea! They showed the way and we're happy to follow their lead and bring that functionality to the WordPress community.
loeschg 14y ago
I spent a good chunk of time last night working through this tutorial (http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-development-and-deployment-with-mamp-git-and-dropbox/ http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-developme...) to set up git deployment for a new Wordpress site. sigh At least I learned some stuff?
- austingunter 14y ago
  I promise you learning that was worth your while :-) Git is a super deep tool, and it takes time to get familiar.
  - loeschg 14y ago
    Taking a look back on all technologies and related configurations I touched (Apache, MySQL, Wordpress, Git), I'd agree it was worth the time. I'm pretty familiar with the basic Git functions (typical pull, push, merge, rebase, etc), though it was my first hands on experience with Git hooks. Git hooks rock.
    - austingunter 14y ago
      Agreed. This makes a big difference in how people can deploy WordPress now. Next time you're doing research, you may want to take a look at nginx and how it works with Apache / what the tradeoffs are. It's a blazing fast server technology.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
duskwuff 14y ago
Since it isn't clear from the article: Is this "git deployment" just for the code components of WordPress (e.g, core upgrades, themes, and plugins), or does it cover content in the database as well? The latter would be much more interesting and useful.
- loeschg 14y ago
  That would be some tricky git work. I'm fairly sure some sort of separate database configuration would still be needed (such as modifying the wp-config file). Jump down to step 7 here (http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-development-and-deployment-with-mamp-git-and-dropbox http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-developme...).
- austingunter 14y ago
  We're recommending that core not be part of the deployment, since that could conflict with normal versioning of WordPress. It covers files and database. Check git.wpengine.com for the super in-depth coverage.
- aaronjorbin 14y ago
  If you want to keep your content in version control, checkout this project - https://github.com/scottgonzalez/grunt-wordpress https://github.com/scottgonzalez/grunt-wordpress .
- pangram 14y ago
  Yeah, I keep my blog posts in text files via git, and just push up to my server using XMLRPC. https://github.com/brool/wordpress-shuffle https://github.com/brool/wordpress-shuffle
yesimahuman 14y ago
Recently moved to WP Engine. Couldn't be happier. Wordpress is awesome but really sucks when you have to host it yourself.
- redorb 14y ago
  I thought about moving but I couldn't get past them using 'visitors' as a tier function in their pricing and also claiming 'unlimited' bandwidth those things are opposites to me. Is that unique visitors or page views?
  - austingunter 14y ago
    That's a really great question, and a lot of people have asked it. So we had Jason write a blog post to explain how we count visits. TL;DR "We take the number of unique IP addresses seen in a 24-hour period as the number of “visits” to the site during that period. The number of “visits” in a given month is the sum of those daily visits during that month." http://wpengine.com/2012/04/visitors/ http://wpengine.com/2012/04/visitors/
    - robbiemitchell 14y ago
      Love the announcement. But a followup question: if WP Engine has excellent built-in caching and optional CDN, why meter so strictly by visits? It reminds me of A/B services that scale similarly: by the time you get up to 100k or 250k visits per month, you also get 50 domains and 1000 simultaneous tests and all sorts of unnecessary stuff.
taylorsmith 14y ago
I'll be interested in seeing how this works. I only occasionally build sites on WordPress, but every time I do, I struggle to come up with a reasonable deployment process. Being able to update plugins and the WP core through the admin panel makes it easy for your server and source code to become out of sync. The configuration file also needs to change for production databases. From what I've seen, there's no agreed upon way to deal with these issues.
ck2 14y ago
Using checkout from the WP svn is developer 101 http://core.svn.wordpress.org/ http://core.svn.wordpress.org/ There is also a plugin svn http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ Installing is not the problem, the problem is WP performance out of the box is horrendous.
- terryjsmith 14y ago
  That's definitely why you want someone like WPEngine doing this for you; Jason and the team there is fantastic and they rival Automattic for their WP knowledge. Out of the box on WPEngine is astronomically better than out of the box on a regular hosting company.
  - brianfryer 14y ago
    This x 1000. I share the same co-working space with WP Engine, and couldn't be more impressed with their service and their team. Kudos, WPE.
  - triiif 14y ago
    would you mind telling us more ? Tweaks/Cache system ? ...
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Git is better for managing Wordpress for a number of reasons: 1. You can add plugins and themes to your local tree. 2. Git doesn't need to be connected to the Wordpress SVN in order to do its work. and, personal opinion: 3. It's faster. Much faster.
timjahn 14y ago
This is really sweet! We switched our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd hosting to WP Engine 4 months ago and haven't had a single issue since. Our previous host was atrocious with insecure support, consistent downtime, and an overall unprofessional demeanor. This sort of innovation is what I love to see with a web host. Keep it up Jason and team! Disclosure: WP Engine is the hosting sponsor for Entrepreneurs Unpluggd.
timdorr 14y ago
And, ironically, their site is down. That's a pretty bad sign for a service that's supposed to provide a more performant installation of Wordpress. I hope it's actually something on the hosting side of things (or maybe they don't use WP for their main site...)
- ry0ohki 14y ago
  I've had really bad luck with their uptime. It doesn't help that they seem under constant DDOS attack.
  - dotBen 14y ago
    Yeah, our DNS provider Zerigo had a nasty DDOS attack over Sunday that many sites got caught up in, including us. As you can imagine, mitigating DDOS on a nameserver is tricky due to the nature of the requests coming in - harder to Deep Packet Inspect and scrub, or easily identify patterns of bad traffic access to zero-route.
    - neilwillgettoit 14y ago
      1. third party zone transfers 2. Anycast DNS 3. Use more than one provider. 4. warm spares that are not in delegation until needed.
      - dotBen 14y ago
        Yup, we're switching to multiple providers. The fact that there were already multiple geographically redundant IPs should have averted most issues, but someone made a highly-coordinated attack on the provider at all their IPs. We learn and move on. I wonder how many other startups are going as far as using DNS from multiple providers? I still see many startups using Go Daddy for their DNS... :/
- dotBen 14y ago
  That's strange, we've not had any notifications of downtime from our own monitoring. I'll investigate now, but not sure what might be causing that.
qeorge 14y ago
Their blog has more information: http://wpengine.com/2012/07/wp-engine-announces-git-push-to-deploy-integrates-version-control-with-wordpress/ http://wpengine.com/2012/07/wp-engine-announces-git-push-to-... Also, their git site has a bit: http://git.wpengine.com/ http://git.wpengine.com/
CCs 14y ago
Similar service: Telegr.am (trough GitHub or Dropbox) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287923
mrinterweb 14y ago
I have been deploying a Wordpress site using capistrano and git for a while now. Seems to work pretty well and it is configurable if you like that kind of thing. This approach is a little more hands on than wpengine, but it provides reliable site deployment. Here's my deploy.rb https://gist.github.com/3174085 https://gist.github.com/3174085
- robbiemitchell 14y ago
  We also recently released a Github project for doing this called "WP Stack". Git, Capistrano, CDN rewrites, and staging environment all in one toolkit. knewt.ly/N119BM
eldavido 14y ago
I don't understand the use case for this at all. I think they're trying to emulate Heroku's git-based deployment, but do WP users even use git? Is Wordpress even designed for continuous deployment?
pknight 14y ago
No WPEngine hosted sites, or their own domain are loading in comodo's chromium based browser... they all go to a 403 forbidden error message

91 points by dotBen 14y ago

IIRC there are already 70(?) million WP sites, with 45(?) million not hosted on wordpress.com. I wouldn't be surprised if this built in git deployment makes that number grow much more quickly. It sounds like a lot of people already treat WP like a tech stack. So, this could basically be treated like heroku.

smartbear 14y ago
Yup, "treating it like Heroku" is exactly our idea! They showed the way and we're happy to follow their lead and bring that functionality to the WordPress community.

loeschg 14y ago

I spent a good chunk of time last night working through this tutorial (http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-development-and-deployment-with-mamp-git-and-dropbox/ http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-developme...) to set up git deployment for a new Wordpress site. sigh At least I learned some stuff?

austingunter 14y ago
I promise you learning that was worth your while :-) Git is a super deep tool, and it takes time to get familiar.
- loeschg 14y ago
  Taking a look back on all technologies and related configurations I touched (Apache, MySQL, Wordpress, Git), I'd agree it was worth the time. I'm pretty familiar with the basic Git functions (typical pull, push, merge, rebase, etc), though it was my first hands on experience with Git hooks. Git hooks rock.
  - austingunter 14y ago
    Agreed. This makes a big difference in how people can deploy WordPress now. Next time you're doing research, you may want to take a look at nginx and how it works with Apache / what the tradeoffs are. It's a blazing fast server technology.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

duskwuff 14y ago

Since it isn't clear from the article: Is this "git deployment" just for the code components of WordPress (e.g, core upgrades, themes, and plugins), or does it cover content in the database as well? The latter would be much more interesting and useful.

loeschg 14y ago
That would be some tricky git work. I'm fairly sure some sort of separate database configuration would still be needed (such as modifying the wp-config file). Jump down to step 7 here (http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-development-and-deployment-with-mamp-git-and-dropbox http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-developme...).
austingunter 14y ago
We're recommending that core not be part of the deployment, since that could conflict with normal versioning of WordPress. It covers files and database. Check git.wpengine.com for the super in-depth coverage.
aaronjorbin 14y ago
If you want to keep your content in version control, checkout this project - https://github.com/scottgonzalez/grunt-wordpress https://github.com/scottgonzalez/grunt-wordpress .
pangram 14y ago
Yeah, I keep my blog posts in text files via git, and just push up to my server using XMLRPC. https://github.com/brool/wordpress-shuffle https://github.com/brool/wordpress-shuffle

yesimahuman 14y ago

Recently moved to WP Engine. Couldn't be happier. Wordpress is awesome but really sucks when you have to host it yourself.

redorb 14y ago
I thought about moving but I couldn't get past them using 'visitors' as a tier function in their pricing and also claiming 'unlimited' bandwidth those things are opposites to me. Is that unique visitors or page views?
- austingunter 14y ago
  That's a really great question, and a lot of people have asked it. So we had Jason write a blog post to explain how we count visits. TL;DR "We take the number of unique IP addresses seen in a 24-hour period as the number of “visits” to the site during that period. The number of “visits” in a given month is the sum of those daily visits during that month." http://wpengine.com/2012/04/visitors/ http://wpengine.com/2012/04/visitors/
  - robbiemitchell 14y ago
    Love the announcement. But a followup question: if WP Engine has excellent built-in caching and optional CDN, why meter so strictly by visits? It reminds me of A/B services that scale similarly: by the time you get up to 100k or 250k visits per month, you also get 50 domains and 1000 simultaneous tests and all sorts of unnecessary stuff.

taylorsmith 14y ago

I'll be interested in seeing how this works. I only occasionally build sites on WordPress, but every time I do, I struggle to come up with a reasonable deployment process. Being able to update plugins and the WP core through the admin panel makes it easy for your server and source code to become out of sync. The configuration file also needs to change for production databases. From what I've seen, there's no agreed upon way to deal with these issues.

ck2 14y ago

Using checkout from the WP svn is developer 101 http://core.svn.wordpress.org/ http://core.svn.wordpress.org/ There is also a plugin svn http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ Installing is not the problem, the problem is WP performance out of the box is horrendous.

terryjsmith 14y ago
That's definitely why you want someone like WPEngine doing this for you; Jason and the team there is fantastic and they rival Automattic for their WP knowledge. Out of the box on WPEngine is astronomically better than out of the box on a regular hosting company.
- brianfryer 14y ago
  This x 1000. I share the same co-working space with WP Engine, and couldn't be more impressed with their service and their team. Kudos, WPE.
- triiif 14y ago
  would you mind telling us more ? Tweaks/Cache system ? ...
jacques_chester 14y ago
Git is better for managing Wordpress for a number of reasons: 1. You can add plugins and themes to your local tree. 2. Git doesn't need to be connected to the Wordpress SVN in order to do its work. and, personal opinion: 3. It's faster. Much faster.

timjahn 14y ago

This is really sweet! We switched our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd hosting to WP Engine 4 months ago and haven't had a single issue since. Our previous host was atrocious with insecure support, consistent downtime, and an overall unprofessional demeanor. This sort of innovation is what I love to see with a web host. Keep it up Jason and team! Disclosure: WP Engine is the hosting sponsor for Entrepreneurs Unpluggd.

timdorr 14y ago

And, ironically, their site is down. That's a pretty bad sign for a service that's supposed to provide a more performant installation of Wordpress. I hope it's actually something on the hosting side of things (or maybe they don't use WP for their main site...)

ry0ohki 14y ago
I've had really bad luck with their uptime. It doesn't help that they seem under constant DDOS attack.
- dotBen 14y ago
  Yeah, our DNS provider Zerigo had a nasty DDOS attack over Sunday that many sites got caught up in, including us. As you can imagine, mitigating DDOS on a nameserver is tricky due to the nature of the requests coming in - harder to Deep Packet Inspect and scrub, or easily identify patterns of bad traffic access to zero-route.
  - neilwillgettoit 14y ago
    1. third party zone transfers 2. Anycast DNS 3. Use more than one provider. 4. warm spares that are not in delegation until needed.
    - dotBen 14y ago
      Yup, we're switching to multiple providers. The fact that there were already multiple geographically redundant IPs should have averted most issues, but someone made a highly-coordinated attack on the provider at all their IPs. We learn and move on. I wonder how many other startups are going as far as using DNS from multiple providers? I still see many startups using Go Daddy for their DNS... :/
dotBen 14y ago
That's strange, we've not had any notifications of downtime from our own monitoring. I'll investigate now, but not sure what might be causing that.

qeorge 14y ago

Their blog has more information: http://wpengine.com/2012/07/wp-engine-announces-git-push-to-deploy-integrates-version-control-with-wordpress/ http://wpengine.com/2012/07/wp-engine-announces-git-push-to-... Also, their git site has a bit: http://git.wpengine.com/ http://git.wpengine.com/

CCs 14y ago

Similar service: Telegr.am (trough GitHub or Dropbox) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287923

mrinterweb 14y ago

I have been deploying a Wordpress site using capistrano and git for a while now. Seems to work pretty well and it is configurable if you like that kind of thing. This approach is a little more hands on than wpengine, but it provides reliable site deployment. Here's my deploy.rb https://gist.github.com/3174085 https://gist.github.com/3174085

robbiemitchell 14y ago
We also recently released a Github project for doing this called "WP Stack". Git, Capistrano, CDN rewrites, and staging environment all in one toolkit. knewt.ly/N119BM

eldavido 14y ago

I don't understand the use case for this at all. I think they're trying to emulate Heroku's git-based deployment, but do WP users even use git? Is Wordpress even designed for continuous deployment?

pknight 14y ago

No WPEngine hosted sites, or their own domain are loading in comodo's chromium based browser... they all go to a 403 forbidden error message