WordPress local development using WP Stack

I’ve been working with a local development extension of WP Stack for a couple months at Knewton, and this now my workflow. I can usually develop in local master, but when needed I’ll work in a local development branch first.

My point is, it’s much simpler to do this than it used to be—so easy a marketing guy can do it. I don’t know of many places where the marketing team has developed this level of self-sufficiency.

Development

  • Open iTerm2

    The dev guys told me this is better than Terminal. I use these three panes to manage my stuff. They use like 12.

  • cd projects/marketing-deploy/vagrant/knewton.com
    • “marketing-deploy” is a private repo (hosted on Github) that handles all our deployment configuration
    • “vagrant” is Vagrant, which handles virtualized development. I’m basically running a second computer on my computer.
    • “knewton.com” is a copy of our WordPress-based site, including database and server configs
  • git pull

    Fetch and merge from the repo’s origin (Github)

  • vagrant up

    Boot up the Vagrant virtualization

  • vagrant knewton:sync

    Sync the database from production to local

  • vagrant knewton:localdev on

    Change my hosts file to point www.knewton.com to my local version

  • Do some work
  • vagrant knewton:localdev off

    Revert hosts file

  • vagrant suspend

    Shut down the Vagrant virtualization

Deployment

  • ssh to the admin box

    The admin box is a separate instance hosted on AWS that handles deployment, rollback, restarting nginx/memcached/etc., and more with single-line commands

  • switch to the deploy user
  • cap deploy