My presentation at WordCamp San Diego 2016 about WordPress development environments.

1. WordPress Development
Environments
Josh Cummings
joshcummingsdesign.com
@jcummingsdesign

2. Objectives
• What is a development environment?
• What tools exist for creating and configuring a
WordPress development environment?
• What tools exist to help us deploy our code?

3. Humble Beginnings

4. Workflow

6. What is a development
environment?

7. A collection of procedures and tools
for writing, testing, debugging, and
deploying your code.

8. What tools do we need
to run WordPress?

9. LAMP Stack
• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

10. LEMP Stack
• Linux
• Nginx
• MariaDB
• PHP

11. The WordPress Stack

13. Local
Development
Staging
Production

14. Command Line Tools
• Versioning (Git / SVN)
• WP-CLI
• Task Runners (Gulp / Grunt)
• Dependency Managers (Composer / npm / Bower)

15. Text Editors / IDEs
• PhpStorm
• Sublime Text
• Atom

16. Database Clients
• Sequel Pro
• Navicat

17. What tools exist to help us set
up our local development
environment?

18. –Terry Pratchett
“If you don't know where you are, then you don't
know where you're going, and if you don't know
where you're going, you're probably going wrong.”

19. Things to Consider
• Will I be working on a team?
• Will I be developing a theme or plugin, or working on
WordPress core?
• How do I plan on deploying my code?

20. The “works on mine” issue.

21. The 3 Month Test

22. Find the right
tools for the job.

23. AMP
• XAMPP
• MAMP
• WAMP

24. MAMP

25. • Simple to setup
• Little to no configuration needed
MAMP - Pros

26. • Brittle, tied to specific versions
• Less parity, more coupled
MAMP - Cons

27. DesktopServer

28. DesktopServer
• Cross-platform
• Easy to setup
• Blueprints will save you time
• Direct Deploy makes deploying easy

29. Native Stack

30. Linux / Mac
• Create an image for your team that has all of the
necessary configuration for your stack
• Leverage scripting for creating new projects and
deploying your code
• Create a custom build of WordPress that you keep in
a git repository which uses composer to track your
plugin dependencies

31. Linux / Mac
• https://github.com/kiriaze/mac-dev-env
• https://gist.github.com/joshcummingsdesign/0f291b3
f73f1e3113227
• https://wpackagist.org/

32. Native Stack - Pros
• Lightweight
• Quickly create new projects
• Works really well when your remote servers always
run a similar configuration
• Fast deploys that you can automate

33. Native Stack - Cons
• More dependencies to manage
• Harder to hand your code over to another developer
unless they have the same build

34. Virtual Machine
(VM)

35. Virtual Box

36. VM - Pros
• Easily create a configure a new server
• Reproduce any environment
• Completely destructible
• Completely decoupled
• Passes the 6 month & “works on mine” tests

37. VM - Cons
• More overhead

38. Vagrant
• Cross-platform
• Create a single file for your project to describe the
type of machine you want (provisioning file)
• One command to spin up an environment
• One command to deploy an environment

39. VVV
• Varying Vagrant Vagrants
• Focused on WordPress development.
• Ideal for developing themes and plugins as well as
for contributing to WordPress core.

40. VVV
• https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV
• https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/

41. Trellis
• Developed by the Roots team
• Vagrant LEMP stack for WordPress with modern
development in mind
• Uses the power of Ansible to provision servers and
deploy with a single command

42. Containers

43. Docker

44. Docker containers wrap up a piece of software in a complete
filesystem that contains everything it needs to run: code,
runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything you can
install on a server. This guarantees that it will always run the
same, regardless of the environment it is running in.

46. Docker
• Docker file
• Builds docker image
• Image sits on top of your machine
• Self-contained processes (microservices)
• Docker Hub

47. Docker
ContainersVM

48. Docker
• Modular
• VM-like features with less overhead
• Deploy very quickly because it only updates the new
information (like Git)

49. Docker for WordPress
• Define the project (YAML)
• Curl WordPress tarball
• Create a wp-config.php
• Run docker-compose up
• Codeship for deployment

50. Continuous Delivery
• Codeship
• Wercker
• Jenkins

51. The Future