Deployment and CI

GitHub Actions CI/CD for WordPress plugin testing and deployment GitHub Actions runs a pipeline on every push and pull request: free for public repositories and with a monthly allowance of minutes for private ones. That is enough to run PHPUnit, the WordPress Coding Standards and PHPStan for a plugin on several PHP and WordPress versions,…

Git submodules for a plugin shared across client sites An agency plugin used in eight client sites tends to end up as eight copies, each with its own small fixes. A Git submodule keeps the plugin in its own repository and puts it into each site repository as a pointer to one commit. A fix…

Set up a bare Git repository and post-receive hook on your server to deploy WordPress changes automatically on git push.

Git commands every WordPress developer needs Without version control, a change to a theme on a live site is a gamble: if something breaks and there is no copy of the old file, there is no easy way back. Git keeps the history of every change, lets two developers work on the same theme without…

Control plugin and theme auto-updates with auto_update_plugin WordPress 5.5 added “Enable auto-updates” links to the Plugins and Themes screens: an administrator can switch automatic updates on per plugin or theme, and WordPress installs new versions in the background twice a day. The filters behind it, auto_update_plugin and auto_update_theme, have existed since WordPress 3.7, and they…

Moved the site to production, but the domain shows a different site Once I ran into strange behavior. After development and successful testing I moved a site to the live server with cPanel. Everything went as it should, with no signs of trouble, but when I opened the live site I was very surprised: it…

How to configure SSH for Git and Bitbucket on a remote server Many developers, juniors especially, clone repositories over HTTPS and enter a username and password (or an app password) on every pull. There is a better way: SSH. You set up a key pair once and never type credentials again. Here is the complete…

Composer in WordPress plugins and themes Composer is the dependency manager of PHP. WordPress core does not use it, but in your own plugins and themes it saves copying libraries by hand: composer require downloads a library with its dependencies, and one autoloader loads all classes, the libraries’ and your own.