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Requirements

  • Regolith is designed to work with Apache, but Nginx will also work fine with some minimal modifications.
  • You'll also need SSH access to your production server.
  • Git and WP-CLI must be installed in all environments. If your host doesn't have Git or WP-CLI installed, check the troubleshooting guide for a workaround.
  • PHP 7.0+. If you can't use that, you could make some minor code changes to make it compatible with PHP 5.3.
  • Unix-based operating systems (Linux, OS X, etc) in all environments. It may be possible to run on Windows with Cygwin, but I haven't tested it.

Troubleshooting

If you run into any problems, check the troubleshooting guide.

Installing Regolith

Setup Local Development Environment

  1. Create the database and database user account. Import any existing data.
  2. git clone this repository to a folder one level above Apache's DocumentRoot.
    1. For example, if DocumentRoot is /home/jane-development/example.test/public_html, then clone Regolith to /home/jane-development/example.test.
  3. Configure Apache's DocumentRoot to be the web/ folder.
  4. (optional) Configure your web server to store PHP/Apache/etc logs in the logs/ folder.
  5. Update all the default configuration.
    1. Copy config/environment-sample.php to config/environment.php.
    2. Update the values in config/*, .gitignore, and anything else you want to customize.
    3. Warning: Before enabling the HSTS header in .htaccess, make sure the site has an active SSL certificate, and that you understand the consequences of HSTS. You may also need to tweak it to include subdomains, preloading, etc.
    4. Add any plugins and themes you want to install to .gitignore. That file acts as the central and canonical list of dependencies, and other scripts (like bin/install-dependencies.sh) will extract the items from there.
      1. Warning: Make sure all 3rd-party plugins/themes are in .gitignore, and that custom ones are not there. See the notes in .gitignore for details.
    5. Update the path in web/.user-sample.ini and move it to web/.user.ini, then restart php-fpm.
  6. Run ./bin/install-dependencies.sh to install dependencies and perform other setup tasks.
  7. Visit the site to make sure everything is loading correctly.
    1. If you're seeing a blank page on the front end, log in to the back end and make sure a valid theme is activated.
  8. If you're setting up a Multisite install, run through the steps in the Multisite installation notes.
  9. Once you've verified that everything is setup correctly in your local environment:
    1. Run git remote set-url origin {your_repo_url} and commit your changes.
      1. Alternately, if you want to start with a clean commit history, you can:rm -rf .git, git init, git add ., git ci -m 'Initial Commit'.
    2. git push to your site's repository.
    3. At this point, your repo is independent of Regolith. You can manually merge in updates if you want, but it's also fine if you don't want to.

Setup Production Environment

  1. Create the production database and database user account. Import any existing data.
  2. Generate an SSH key pair if you don't already have one, and copy your public key to the server.
    1. ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]"
    2. ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/mykey user@host
    3. At this point, you should be able to ssh user@host without entering a password.
  3. ssh to your production server and cd to the site's root directory (e.g., cd /home/jane-production/example.org)
  4. git clone your remote repository to a folder one level above Apache's DocumentRoot.
    1. For example, if DocumentRoot is /home/jane-production/example.org/public_html, then clone Regolith to /home/jane-production/example.org.
  5. Configure Apache's DocumentRoot to be the web/ folder.
    1. If your host doesn't let you change that, you can replace the existing DocumentRoot folder with a symlink to the web folder.
  6. Upload a copy of your local environment.php to the production server's config/ folder, and update the values to match production's config.
    1. This is required because environment.php is never checked in to source control (because it contains sensitive and machine-specific information).
  7. Update any paths in web/.user.ini. It'll probably take a few minutes for changes to this file to take effect.
  8. Run bin/install-dependencies.sh
  9. Visit the site to make sure everything is loading correctly.
    1. If you're seeing a blank page on the front end, log in to the back end and make sure a valid theme is activated.
  10. From your local development environment, run bin/deploy.sh to test the deployment process.
    1. For added convenience, you can optionally add a deploy function to your ~/.bashrc file, and have it automatically call the deploy script regardless of which directory you're in. That way you don't have to specify the path to the folder. You can also make it support multiple sites as well, so that you can use a single consistent command for all sites you work on, even if they use different deployment mechanisms. See iandunn/dotfiles/.bashrc for an example.

Optional Steps for Production

  1. Setup HTTP content sensors with a monitoring service -- like Uptime Robot -- to look for the value of REGOLITH_CONTENT_SENSOR_FLAG in https://example.org/wp-login.php and https://example.org/?s={timestamp}.
    1. The timestamp serves as a cachebuster. If the monitoring service doesn't allow timestamp tokens, then you can also use Super Cache's donotcachepage parameter along with the value of REGOLITH_WP_SUPER_CACHE_SECRET.
  2. Setup CloudFlare, including Page Rules to cache dynamic content. (write your own blog post about this w/ examples, note about not cahcing logged-in views for security. then link the article here -- https://iandunn.name/?p=2354)
  3. Configure the SMTP settings in environment.php to send outbound email through a transactional mail service.
    1. I like Mailgun, but any service that supports SMTP should work.
    2. I don't recommend Gmail or other consumer email services, because they're not designed to be used in this way. I've seen Gmail start rejecting messages all of the sudden for various reasons, without any advanced warning or failure notification.
    3. Don't forget to update your SPF and/or DKIM records too.
  4. Tweak OPCache settings.
    1. bin/deploy.sh will reset the OPCache contents, so you should be able to set opcache.validate_timestamps = 0, to avoid the performance penalty associated with checking the timestamps. I haven't tested that yet, though. If you do, keep in mind that you'll need to manually reset the cache if you ever directly modify production files (while troubleshooting, etc).
  5. Configure your web server to store PHP/Apache/etc logs in the logs/ folder. PHP logs should already be going there (see config/wordpress.php), but it's best to set this via php.ini/phprc/.user.ini to be safe.
    1. It's also a good idea to test and make sure that the logs are actually being populated, since file permissions or other issues could prevent it.

Regular Usage

After you have Regolith setup in your local and production environments, you can use a traditional workflow, like this example:

  1. Make and test your code changes in your local environment.
  2. git add, git commit, git push
  3. bin/deploy.sh
  4. Verify the changes work on production.

Periodically, when you want to refresh the content in your development environment from the production site, you can run bin/sync-production-content.sh.