Recipes for deploying and maintaining remote WordPress installations with Capistrano.

This is an alternative version control and deployment strategy from the one presented in WP-Stack. WP-Stack expects WordPress Core to be included in the project as a git submodule; these recipes pull WordPress in from SVN (and can therefore also deploy multisite environments with WP at the root).

This is a Capistrano 2.X plugin, not for use with capistrano 3

Contribute to the (possible) migration to Cap 3

This is a plugin for the Capistrano deployment tool. If you are unfamiliar with Capistrano, we would suggest at least familiarizing yourself with the general concepts outlined in the Capistrano Wiki.

• Your code repository is your webroot

gem install capistrano-wp
cd /path/to/repository
capify-wp .

1. Create a user for deploying your WordPress install
2. Create an SSH key for the deploy user, and make sure you can SSH to it from your local machine
3. Install RubyGems. Crowd Favorite prefers to use RVM to maintain ruby versions, rubygems, and self-contained sets of gems.
4. Install the capistrano-wp gem (which will install Capistrano and friends): gem install capistrano-wp
5. Follow Install / Setup steps above
6. Make sure your :deploy_to path exists and is owned by the deploy user
7. Run cap deploy:setup to set up the initial directories
8. Run cap deploy to push out a new version of your code
9. Update your web server configuration to point to the current-release directory (in the :deply_to directory, named httpdocs by default)
10. Relax and enjoy painless deployment

This deployment strategy comes with multi-stage support baked in.

For documentation regarding this portion of functionality, see the Capistrano Multistage Documentation.

This gem handles WordPress via SVN directly from WordPress.org.

In your main config/deploy.rb file you will see how to declare what version of WordPress you wish to use by defining an SVN location like branches/3.6, tags/3.6.1 or even trunk:

set :wordpress_version, "branches/3.5"

It then places WordPress where you declare it to live within the stage specific configuration files, for example config/deploy/production.rb:

set(:wp_path) { File.join(release_path, "wp") }

This places WordPress in a directory called "wp" within your webroot.

It also gracefully handles the situation where both your code repository and WordPress live at the webroot.

This process enables you to not have to track WordPress within your code repository.

If for some reason you want to avoid installing WordPress, omit or set to false the :wordpress_version option:

set :wordpress_version, false

This gem augments the way capistrano handles directories you need to "persist" between releases. Providing a declarative interface for these items.

There are some common directories that WordPress needs to act this way. By default, if the following directories exist in the "shared" directory, they will be symlinked into every release.

• cache is linked to wp-content/cache
• uploads is linked to wp-content/uploads
• blogs.dir is linked to wp-content/blogs.dir

This is the way these would be declared, either in the main config/deploy.rb or in your stage specific files, if they weren't defaults

set :wp_symlinks, [{
  "cache" => "wp-content/cache"
  "uploads" => "wp-content/uploads"
  "blogs.dir" => "wp-content/blogs.dir"
}]

These will happen without any further configuration changes. If you wish to override any of these defaults, you can set the target of the link to nil

set :wp_symlinks, [{
  "cache" => nil
}]

This would turn off the default cache symlink

You can easily add your own project (or even stage) specific links

If you have a customlink directory in the shared directory, you can add a custom link like so.

set :wp_symlinks, [{
  "customlink" => "wp-content/themes/mytheme/customlinktarget"
}]

These are handled almost identically as above except they are copied from the shared directory instead of symlinked.

This is primarily for config files that are sometimes written to by plugins. In some cases when php tries to write to a symbolic link, the link is destroyed and becomes a zero byte file.

By default the following copies are attempted

set :wp_configs, [{
  "db-config.php" => "/",
  "advanced-cache.php" => "wp-content/",
  "object-cache.php" => "wp-content/",
  "*.html" => "/",
}]

You can follow the same steps as the symlinks for modification or addition to the default config copying rules.

Stage specific overrides allow you to target specific configuration files to their respective stage.

You need to use a specific set of .htaccess rules for production.

If you place a file named production-htaccess in your config/ directory

and add it to your :stage_specific_overrides in your config/deploy/production.rb

set :stage_specific_overrides, {
  ".htaccess" => ".htaccess"
}

This will place the proper production-htaccess file in the root of your next release, overriding any existing file of the same name.

By default, it looks for the common .htaccess situation along with local-config.php

set :stage_specific_overrides, {
  "local-config.php" => "local-config.php",
  ".htaccess" => ".htaccess"
}

Modifications and additions are handled similarly to symlinks and configs, but note the lack of a wrapping []

You can remove specific files and directories from your releases at the time of deploy.

By default the list of things the gem strips out looks like this

set :copy_exclude, [
  ".git",
  "Capfile",
  "/config",
  "capinfo.json",
  ".DS_Store",
]

This excludes the listed files from making it into a release

For this you actually need to re-declare the set to add / remove these exclusions.

For example, to allow the .git directory to exist in the releases, you would re-declare the option completely. Removing the .git entry.

set :copy_exclude, [
  "Capfile",
  "/config",
  "capinfo.json",
  ".DS_Store",
]

This is usually placed in config/deploy.rb but can also be placed at the stage level.

This gem by default checks the current release for modifications since it was deployed. Either you're dealing with clients that like to make changes in production, or you have plugins that write configs and other things to the file system. This step protects you against moving changes that have happened in the target stage out of use.

When deploying, if it detects a change it will stop the deploy process, and provide you with a listing of all the files that have been either added, changed, or deleted.

At this point you can rectify the changes yourself if you wish, adding them to your source control, or verifying you don't need them.

Then you call the deploy like this to force it to create the new release.

cap cf:localchanges:allow_differences deploy

This will tell the deploy to ignore any of these changes and proceed.

If you would like to turn this feature off, you can have it force this by default with the following option set in either your main config/deploy.rb or your stage specific files.

set :snapshot_allow_differences, true

If you would like to ignore changes to specific files, you can declare an option:

set :localchanges_excludes, {
  :deleted => ['deleted_file_to_ignore'],
  :created => ['subdirectory/createdfile'],
  :changed => ['changedfile'],
  :any => ['ignoredfile']
}

Filenames are relative to the webroot, and are exact; there is no current provision for globbing or directory tree exclusion. The :any list will ignore all changes to a given file - deletion, creation, or content changes - while the other lists may be useful for more limited exclusions - for instance, a file that can be deleted but should never be changed if it remains present.

capistrano-wp includes a slight enhancement to the :git scm module. The one shipped with Capistrano 2 does not gracefully handle submodules being removed in the repo; they stick around in the cached copy.

The enhancement gives an extra -f to git clean to induce it to remove the submodule detritus, and also runs the clean in every submodule (with git submodule foreach).

gem install bundle
bundle install
rake install

When updating the gem requirements:

rake gemspec

Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Crowd Favorite, Ltd. Released under the Apache License, version 2.0. See LICENSE.txt for further details.