Toby Schrapel

Open your ~/.valet/Nginx/{site}.dev

Add the following and replace PATH_TO where ever you installed Simple SAML.

location  /simplesaml {
  alias PATH_TO/simplesamlphp/www;
  location ~ .php(/|$) {
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/.valet/valet.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include fastcgi_params;
  }
}

Run valet restart

I was recently working on a project that was hosted on WP Engine. I wanted to use things like Composer or Yarn and after speaking to others they recommended trying out DeployBot as a continuous deployment tool. I found the platform to be quite restrictive and spent a lot of time getting it to work how I’d like.

I had been deploying to staging for months to demo to the client. When I deployed to production the theme I was using did not work. It’s a site powered by Sage 9 that uses Blade as a template engine. These templates are rendered at runtime and cached in the wp-content/uploads directory. WP Engine does not allow the PHP user to write to the system. This makes sense to prevent rogue plugins from having write access but I would expect to have the same configuration between staging and production.

Blade offers a function to compile a template which requires all functions in the templates to be valid or accessible. So any function calls to WordPress would require that WP has been loaded. WP functions will not load unless you have an active database (or at least to my knowledge). I could no longer use DeployBot because they did not support multiple containers.

I switched to Gitlab CI which is very similar to CircleCI or Bitbucket. My Gitlab configuration uses a PHP 7 CLI container that has access to a MySQL service.

I should really create a Docker container that already has all my services preinstalled and also cache Composer / Yarn dependencies to speed up the build but it deploys within a couple of minutes so I am not too bothered about this.

Couple of notes:

1. Change the cache path to the root of your install ABSPATH . /cache/compiled in app/setup.php
2. Create a private key that has access to your WPE install and add this as a environment variable in Gitlab CI called PRIVATE_KEY
3. Create an environment variable in Gitlab for your WPE_INSTALL and THEME_NAME
4. Create an environment in Gitlab CI called staging and production (case sensitive)
5. I would suggest adding your WP Engine install as a known host instead of turning off StrictHostKeyChecking

The code is pretty self explanatory but let me know if you have any questions.

bin/deploy

if [ "production" != "${CI_ENVIRONMENT_NAME}" ]; then
    FOLDER=/nas/content/staging
else
    FOLDER=/nas/content/live
fi

git config --global user.email "${WPE_INSTALL}@${WPE_INSTALL}.com"
git config --global user.name "${WPE_INSTALL}"
git clone git@git.wpengine.com:${CI_ENVIRONMENT_NAME}/${WPE_INSTALL}.git $FOLDER
rsync -a --exclude='.git/' --exclude='.gitignore' $(pwd)/ $FOLDER
cd $FOLDER
composer install --no-ansi --no-dev --no-interaction --optimize-autoloader --no-progress
cd ./wp-content/themes/${THEME_NAME}
yarn
yarn run build:production
cd ../../../
wp --allow-root core config --dbname=wordpress --dbuser=root --dbpass=wordpress --dbhost=mysql
wp --allow-root core install --url=${WPE_INSTALL}.dev --title=${WPE_INSTALL} --admin_user=wordpress --admin_email=${WPE_INSTALL}@${WPE_INSTALL}.com --skip-email
wp --allow-root theme activate ${THEME_NAME}/resources
wp --allow-root blade compile
rm -rf ./wp-content/themes/${THEME_NAME}/.gitignore
rm -rf .gitignore
mv .gitignoredeploy .gitignore
git add .
git commit -m "Deployment Commit"
git push origin master

.gitlab-ci.yml

image: php:7.0.18-cli

services:
  - mysql:latest

variables:
  MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
  MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: wordpress

before_script:
  # Updates
  - curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | bash
  - apt-get update
  - apt-get -y install libpcre3-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev nodejs git zip unzip curl rsync mysql-client
  - docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-png-dir=/usr --with-jpeg-dir=/usr
  - docker-php-ext-install zip bz2 gd mysqli pdo pdo_mysql

  # Composer
  - php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
  - php -r "copy('https://composer.github.io/installer.sig', 'composer-setup.sig');"
  - php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === trim(file_get_contents('composer-setup.sig'))) { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
  - php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
  - php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
  - php -r "unlink('composer-setup.sig');"

  # Install Node / Yarn
  - npm -g install yarn

  # WP CLI
  - curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
  - chmod +x wp-cli.phar
  - mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp
  - php -d memory_limit=512M /usr/local/bin/wp --allow-root package install git@github.com:schrapel/blade-generate.git

  # SSH
  - 'which ssh-agent || ( apt-get update -y && apt-get install openssh-client -y )'
  - eval $(ssh-agent -s)
  - ssh-add <(echo "$SSH_PRIVATE_KEY")
  - mkdir -p ~/.ssh
  - '[[ -f /.dockerenv ]] && echo -e "Host *\n\tStrictHostKeyChecking no\n\n" > ~/.ssh/config'

deploy_staging:
  only:
    - develop
  environment:
    name: staging
    url: http://$WPE_INSTALL.staging.wpengine.com
  script: ./bin/deploy

deploy_production:
  only:
    - master
  environment:
    name: production
    url: http://$WPE_INSTALL.wpengine.com
  when:
    manual
  script: ./bin/deploy

.gitignoredeploy

# Ignore everything in the root except the "wp-content" & "vendor" directory.
/*
!.git
!.gitignore
!wp-content/
!vendor/

# Ignore specific files for deployment
node_modules

# Plugins
wp-content/*
!wp-content/mu-plugins/
!wp-content/plugins/
!wp-content/themes/

# Uploads
!cache/
cache/*
!cache/compiled/

# Themes
wp-content/themes/*
!wp-content/themes/amblin-theme/

# Mac-specific
.DS_Store

# Dev files
.svn

# known large file types
*.hqx
*.bin
*.exe
*.dll
*.deb
*.dmg
*.iso
*.img
*.msi
*.msp
*.msm
*.mid
*.midi
*.kar
*.mng
*.asx
*.asf
*.wmv
*.zip
*.tar
*.tgz
*.gz
*.mp4