sunbuild / wordpressazure

wordpress sample for azure supporting multiple environments - local, stage, prod etc

WordPress popularity has grown in the past few years and it’s more of CMS framework now and not just a blogging framework. WordPress does not scale out of the box to work with multiple environments. Lots of questions come to mind when working with a CMS/frameworks such as

• How to break it out into different environments
• What files can I change and wont impact framework version updates
• How to manage configuration per environment
• How to manage modules/plugins version updates , core library/framework version updates

Having a strong understanding of your framework solution is key to help answer the questions mentioned above. Azure Web Apps has a few features that make it easier to store configuration settings outside of your code. This is a fork of wordpress which includes sample configuration files for wordpress app to run in multiple environments on azure web apps.

Pre-requisites:

• Create a staging slot and staging database
• Create dev slot if there are more than one developer on a project
• Install [Root Relative Urls] (https://wordpress.org/plugins/root-relative-urls/) on your local developement wordpress site
• Include the configuration files mentioned above with the code changes in wp-config to programmatically choose the right configuration based on environment
• Add App settings for Environment specific configuration [Environment Variables or App settings] (https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2013/07/17/windows-azure-web-sites-how-application-strings-and-connection-strings-work/) that can be used across multiple websites reflecting your staging and production sites

Workflow: Complete pre-requisties and have a stable version of your development website.

• Develop your web application
• Backup your production website
• Merge your local development database with your production database so all the content is in sync.
• Deploy to Staging slot(website) and Test your application
• Deploy to production by using SWAP feature of deployment slots . Preview changes in settings of your web app configuration as shown in the Azure portal before executing SWAP operation

Repeat this process during every deployment . **At no point does a team member make changes directly to the Staging or Production environments.**Note that new deployment only occurs in wordpress when

• Push a code fix
• Delete/add new plugins
• Update WordPress core
• Upate your theme

When working with teams involving more than one developer, I recommend using Github to create multiple branches and set up continuous deployment to your development and staging code websites can help provide better source code control to roll back/debug/resolve issues.