Tools for WordPress

This is a box of tools for working with WordPress on the command line, automating WordPress, and Fabric scripts for automated deployment.

One-liner to setup a new project using these tools:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/newsapps/wp-project-tools/master/setup.sh)"

Project layout

We moved everything out of the WordPress directory so that we could make ample use of git submodules. Plugins, themes and uploads are now outside of the WordPress directory.

data/       # Store configuration for the site, data dumps and data files for doing migrations
lib/        # Place to put extra php libraries
uploads/    # Wordpress uploads for a single blog or the root blog in a network
blogs.dir/  # Uploads for network blogs
plugins/    # Put your wordpress plugins here
tools/      # This repository
http/       # Place for your apache, nginx, http server config files
mu-plugins/ # Put your wordpress mu plugins here
themes/     # Put your wordpress themes here
wordpress/  # The WordPress codebase
wp-scripts/ # Place for putting command-line scripts that do WordPressy things
manage.sh   # Do fun stuff from the command line
fabfile.py  # Fabric automated deployment config

manage.sh

The management script does a few simple things.

• manage.sh runserver Starts an http server for local development
• manage.sh setup_env Install the required python packages for using all of these tools
• manage.sh shell Starts an interactive WordPress shell. Evaluate php, test WordPress queries, etc.
• manage.sh script_name script_arg This will look for a php script in wp-scripts/ or tools/wp-scripts with the name script_name.php and run it with the arguments provided. You can create your own scripts and place them in wp-scripts/. See below for how to write your own scripts.

Setup the development server

These are the instructions for setting up the development server on Mac OS X using Homebrew. If you are not on Mac OS X or using Homebrew, look up the instructions for how to install nginx, php-fpm, memcached, and the memcache-php extension for your setup.

Use brew to install the following packages:

$ brew install nginx memcached memcache-php

Get the php recipe:

$ brew install https://raw.github.com/adamv/homebrew-alt/master/duplicates/php.rb --with-mysql --with-fpm

Enable the memcache extension:

$ mate /usr/local/etc/php.ini

add

extension="/usr/local/Cellar/memcache-php/2.2.6/memcache.so"

to the extension section.

Make sure the new php and nginx is on your path:

$ export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Use the manage script to start the server:

$ ./manage.sh runserver

This script will load the nginx config file http/development-nginx.conf.

Logging will be outputted to the terminal session

Writing management scripts

Management scripts are easy!

These are simple php scripts that perform a simple task in WordPress (updating settings, migrating data) which can be run from the command line.

Just add this line to the top of your php script:

include( 'tools/cli-load.php' );

This include will bootstrap WordPress for you. It does roughly the same thing as wp-load.php or wp-blog-header.php, but is safe to use from the command line.

This include also creates a $settings global. This settings variable is an associative array that is loaded with the contents of the data/*_settings.json file. There are three different settings files: development, staging, and production. The file that is loaded depends on the value of your DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable. If this variable is missing or empty, the development settings file will be loaded.