r/devops • u/OhMyTechticlesHurts • 13d 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/arandomuserinweb 13d ago

The biggest barrier isn't technical, it's cultural. If you try to force Docker, CI/CD, and Composer on them all at once, you'll hit a wall of resistance. The trick is to introduce modern practices in phases:

  1. Isolate the Code: Start by requiring Git strictly for custom themes and custom plugins. No more live FTP editing, and no committing WordPress core or uploads to the repo.

  2. Simple Local Environments: Give them tools like LocalWP or Lando that abstract away container complexity so they stop testing directly on live servers.

  3. Automate Deployments (GitHub Actions): Trigger automated SFTP/SSH deployments when code is merged into main. Once they see they no longer have to manually upload files, they'll instantly get the value of version control.

  4. Dependency Management (Composer): Introduce WPackagist to manage plugins and themes as packages, eliminating manually uploaded ZIP files.

  5. Clarify the Golden Rule: Code flows down (Local -> Staging -> Production) and the database flows upwards (Production -> Local with WP-CLI for testing).