
WP Engine launches git deployment for WordPress - dotBen
http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/24/wp-engine-gunning-for-the-wordpress-market-by-targeting-developers/
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qeorge
Their blog has more information: [http://wpengine.com/2012/07/wp-engine-
announces-git-push-to-...](http://wpengine.com/2012/07/wp-engine-announces-
git-push-to-deploy-integrates-version-control-with-wordpress/)

Also, their git site has a bit: <http://git.wpengine.com/>

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thomasknoll
IIRC there are already 70(?) million WP sites, with 45(?) million not hosted
on wordpress.com. I wouldn't be surprised if this built in git deployment
makes that number grow much more quickly. It sounds like a lot of people
already treat WP like a tech stack. So, this could basically be treated like
heroku.

~~~
smartbear
Yup, "treating it like Heroku" is _exactly_ our idea! They showed the way and
we're happy to follow their lead and bring that functionality to the WordPress
community.

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yesimahuman
Recently moved to WP Engine. Couldn't be happier. Wordpress is awesome but
really sucks when you have to host it yourself.

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redorb
I thought about moving but I couldn't get past them using 'visitors' as a tier
function in their pricing and also claiming 'unlimited' bandwidth those things
are opposites to me. Is that unique visitors or page views?

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austingunter
That's a really great question, and a lot of people have asked it. So we had
Jason write a blog post to explain how we count visits.

TL;DR "We take the number of unique IP addresses seen in a 24-hour period as
the number of “visits” to the site during that period. The number of “visits”
in a given month is the sum of those daily visits during that month."

<http://wpengine.com/2012/04/visitors/>

~~~
robbiemitchell
Love the announcement. But a followup question: if WP Engine has excellent
built-in caching and optional CDN, why meter so strictly by visits?

It reminds me of A/B services that scale similarly: by the time you get up to
100k or 250k visits per month, you also get 50 domains and 1000 simultaneous
tests and all sorts of unnecessary stuff.

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taylorsmith
I'll be interested in seeing how this works. I only occasionally build sites
on WordPress, but every time I do, I struggle to come up with a reasonable
deployment process.

Being able to update plugins and the WP core through the admin panel makes it
easy for your server and source code to become out of sync. The configuration
file also needs to change for production databases. From what I've seen,
there's no agreed upon way to deal with these issues.

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loeschg
I spent a good chunk of time last night working through this tutorial
([http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-
developme...](http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-development-
and-deployment-with-mamp-git-and-dropbox/)) to set up git deployment for a new
Wordpress site. _sigh_ At least I learned some stuff?

~~~
austingunter
I promise you learning that was worth your while :-) Git is a super deep tool,
and it takes time to get familiar.

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loeschg
Taking a look back on all technologies and related configurations I touched
(Apache, MySQL, Wordpress, Git), I'd agree it was worth the time. I'm pretty
familiar with the basic Git functions (typical pull, push, merge, rebase,
etc), though it was my first hands on experience with Git hooks. Git hooks
rock.

~~~
austingunter
Agreed. This makes a big difference in how people can deploy WordPress now.
Next time you're doing research, you may want to take a look at nginx and how
it works with Apache / what the tradeoffs are. It's a blazing fast server
technology.

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timjahn
This is really sweet!

We switched our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd hosting to WP Engine 4 months ago and
haven't had a single issue since. Our previous host was atrocious with
insecure support, consistent downtime, and an overall unprofessional demeanor.

This sort of innovation is what I love to see with a web host. Keep it up
Jason and team!

Disclosure: WP Engine is the hosting sponsor for Entrepreneurs Unpluggd.

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timdorr
And, ironically, their site is down. That's a pretty bad sign for a service
that's supposed to provide a more performant installation of Wordpress. I hope
it's actually something on the hosting side of things (or maybe they don't use
WP for their main site...)

~~~
dotBen
That's strange, we've not had any notifications of downtime from our own
monitoring.

I'll investigate now, but not sure what might be causing that.

~~~
timdorr
It wasn't working for me before, but appears up now that I'm at home. I was on
Georgia Tech campus (which I believe peers with Level3 for most commercial
traffic), if that helps. Might have been a backend/infrastructure thing (like
I hoped).

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duskwuff
Since it isn't clear from the article: Is this "git deployment" just for the
code components of WordPress (e.g, core upgrades, themes, and plugins), or
does it cover content in the database as well? The latter would be much more
interesting and useful.

~~~
austingunter
We're recommending that core not be part of the deployment, since that could
conflict with normal versioning of WordPress. It covers files and database.
Check git.wpengine.com for the super in-depth coverage.

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CCs
Similar service: Telegr.am (trough GitHub or Dropbox)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287923>

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mrinterweb
I have been deploying a Wordpress site using capistrano and git for a while
now. Seems to work pretty well and it is configurable if you like that kind of
thing. This approach is a little more hands on than wpengine, but it provides
reliable site deployment.

Here's my deploy.rb <https://gist.github.com/3174085>

~~~
robbiemitchell
We also recently released a Github project for doing this called "WP Stack".
Git, Capistrano, CDN rewrites, and staging environment all in one toolkit.
knewt.ly/N119BM

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ck2
Using checkout from the WP svn is developer 101
<http://core.svn.wordpress.org/>

There is also a plugin svn <http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/>

Installing is not the problem, the problem is WP performance out of the box is
horrendous.

~~~
terryjsmith
That's definitely why you want someone like WPEngine doing this for you; Jason
and the team there is fantastic and they rival Automattic for their WP
knowledge. Out of the box on WPEngine is astronomically better than out of the
box on a regular hosting company.

~~~
brianfryer
This x 1000. I share the same co-working space with WP Engine, and couldn't be
more impressed with their service and their team.

Kudos, WPE.

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eldavido
I don't understand the use case for this at all. I think they're trying to
emulate Heroku's git-based deployment, but do WP users even use git? Is
Wordpress even designed for continuous deployment?

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pknight
No WPEngine hosted sites, or their own domain are loading in comodo's chromium
based browser... they all go to a 403 forbidden error message

