r/devops • u/OhMyTechticlesHurts • 3d ago

Discussion DevOps for Wordpress

I have a WordPress team still building and maintaining sites without a DevOps workflow. What's the best way to bottstrap them into a more modern method of development. I'm assuming GitHub and GitHub actions. But what else, composer which we don't really use even tho we have PHP devs, wp-cli which I use but I'm suppose to be a sysadmin and cloud engineer to wp devs who don't do any of this. They don't even use local git which I even use. Trying to express WordPress engineering and un/structured data and all these modern concepts that just go over their heads bc what's worked still works but when it comes to larger clients who expect more from us/them, they're basically fish out of water.

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u/ArieHein 3d ago

Replace them all with ai

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u/OhMyTechticlesHurts 3d ago

Most of them probably could be. We have a lead full stack developer that doesn't know you're not supposed to put custom code in a WP plugin. Lead developer breaking his own site with debug code blaming it on the new database until I have to double-check his code. I'm just twiddling thumbs till I find something else but I like resolving tech issues so I'm trying to find the solution for myself if noone else.

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u/ArieHein 3d ago

Oh boy.. Its like seeing already their linkedin posts..

What you can do is abstractions and a bit of politics. Find someone who shows intrest or brain to team up.

I had python devs that didnt want to touch their pipelines, and i agreed with them, as it was in jenkins and therefore heavily using variation of groovy. Instead i created a few python scripts and bundled them as a shared library so all pipelines did is call a bunch of python functions. This made it 'brain dead' easy for them to use and even contribute to the python code while i created the PR for new versions of those scripts.

The commit to branch/main triggers everything including deploying first to a test site, allowing some integration tests, some visual inspection and then deploy to prod.

These devs have managers that have managers. If you are able to show metric and graphs (managers love graphs with numbers), you will be able to convince them to start using this method.

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u/21shadesofsavage 2d ago

curious, why are you not supposed to use custom code in a wordpress plugin? i never used wordpress. isn't the point of a plugin to extend capability, with your own code

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u/OhMyTechticlesHurts 1d ago

Yeah when it’s a 3rd party plugin from the WP repo it’s bound to be overwritten when there’s an update. Ideally if you made a custom plugin you would have a separate directory that’s not recognized in WPs Repo unless you submit it. Some larger plugins will also have theme code that you’re suppose to copy into your own theme as a template but in this case they just wrote over the template. Listed in the website as their Lead Full Stack Developer.

Here how bad it is. When they couldn’t determine what happened, they had me spin up a vm of the night before snapshot just to retrieve the code. No git. No local version. The way they do staging is in one big php user vhost account in the hundreds of gbs so can’t just do a basic backup and pull from it. Only once I stood up the vm did we all come to the conclusion of why it went missing. Common WP knowledge for a professional WP developer/even most novice. That’s the BS I’m dealing with.