The other day I was asked to set up deployment pipe for a blog website built in Wordpress. Although I was a PHP developer for a few years before I switched to Ruby, I’ve never worked with WordPress. Plus the last time I’ve seen PHP code was like 6 years ago. That should not be a problem as I will not be working with Wordpress internals here, however if you find anything I’ve missed or incorrectly explained please leave a comment (…or even better do a pull request for this article :) )

I will not be explaining how to set up Wordpress or how to install Appache (you have plenty of articles on that topics article 1). I will purely explain only how to configure CodeShip continues deployment of an existing WordPress website (and it will be really basic implementation). I will assume that you have a working Wordpress website in a directory /var/www/my-project and all the database & Apache setup is working on a VM not on a hosting.

For sake of simplicity the article will be explaining setup on AWS EC2 instance but the steps apply to any VM as long as you can SSH to it via ssh key-pair.

I’ll assume that your AWS EC2 instance have a home folder in /home/ec2-user/. Some EC2 instances have /home/ubuntu or /home/centos well that’s ok just make sure you change any of the lines in the script bellow to whatever is your EC2 user home folder.

I was told that a good practice in WordPress project is just to commit and deploy changes of a template (in our case my-application/wp-content/themes/mytheme/). Therefore this article is not dealing with syncing up plugins or assets. Just purely deployng changes of a Wordpress template.

Setup

First step: create a CodeShip project.

Then go to Project Settings > General and copy SSH public key for the project to your clipboard. We will need to paste this SSH key to VM (EC2 server).

ssh to the EC2 instance ssh [email protected] paste the the key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Make sure you don’t delete any existing keys in the file.

Now clone the project to your home folder git clone [email protected]:me/my-project.git. Therefore now we have a folder /home/ec2-user/my-project (not /var/www)

Awesome, now go back to CodeShip project and go to Project Setting > Deployment. In section Configure a branch that triggers the deployment pipeline select Branch starts with and type live-. This way we will be trigering a deployment to any branch that has this prefix like live-20161101

After you Save pipline settings a section "Add deployment" appears. Click the icon that says: “Custom Script” (big blue dolar sign icon). Paste this to this script window:

BRANCH_NAME="${CI_BRANCH}"
ROOT_FOLDER="/home/ec2-user/my-project"
EC2_SERVER="[email protected]"
fetch_branch="cd $ROOT_FOLDER && git fetch origin" && echo $fetch_branch
ssh $EC2_SERVER $fetch_branch
pull_branch="cd $ROOT_FOLDER && git checkout $BRANCH_NAME && git pull
origin $BRANCH_NAME" && echo $pull_branch
ssh $EC2_SERVER $pull_branch
ssh $EC2_SERVER "rsync -rvI $ROOT_FOLDER/themes/mytheme/ /var/www/my-application/wp-content/themes/mytheme/"

The script does following:

  1. sets $BRANCH_NAME variable with the name of the branch (e.g.: live-20161101) from the webhook (yes you can use directly the $CI_BRANCH but I like this way better as you can override it in future)
  2. set some other varibale with location of the git ropo folder (ROOT_FOLDER), login to the server(EC2_SERVER)
  3. fetch remote branches on VM
  4. checkout to the deployment branch e.g.: live-20161101 and pull it’s content (on VM)
  5. sync folder /home/ec2-user/my-project/themes/mytheme/ to https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/1282338?hl=en-GB

If you are in doubt what would the rsync command override you can just add --dry-run option at the end. This will just output stuf to your console but wont change any files:

` ssh $EC2_SERVER “rsync -rvI $ROOT_FOLDER/themes/mytheme/ /var/www/my-application/wp-content/themes/mytheme/ –dry-run`

Please remove the --dry-run when you’re ready.

Ok now on push some change to project Github repo branch live-20161101. If configured correctly CodeShip will do the changes of a template.

Note: Be sure that you have your server firewall set up in a way that it will enable CodeShip to SSH to you machine othevise the SSH connection will Freeze https://codeship.com/documentation/faq/enabling-access-to-servers/