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Dusty: A WordPress Composer Starter Repo

Dusty is an example WordPress starter repo based around Composer and Docker. It allows you to create WordPress repos without the need to store core WordPress files in your Git repository. This makes for far easier deployments and cleaner code. It also allows you to load in non-WordPress packages such as PHPDotEnv via Composer.

Setup

To make use of Dusty you will need to install both Composer and Docker locally. Composer is a PHP package manager linked to Packagist and Docker is a containerisation platform that allows you to easily generate development and production environments.

Installation

Installation assumes you are working in a Linux or a Linux like environment.

Install using Composer:

Build Docker:

Create .env file with WordPress salts:

Once these steps have been completed go to localhost:8080 to use WordPress and finish off the installation process.

Package and Plugin Management

By default Composer can pull in packages from Packagist, and this is great if you wish to extend WordPress with more general PHP libraries and frameworks. This though does not help you easily manage plugins and themes. Dusty though integrates with a package manager called WPackagist which is the WordPress equivalent of Packagist for plugins and themes.

You can add your plugins and themes to your composer.json file in exactly the same way as you add PHP packages. They will also be placed in the relevant WordPress directories, rather than the vendor folder.

Use Private Repos

Sometimes you'll wish to keep some of your code private but still pull it in via Composer. For instance you may have a WordPress theme that contains branded material and custom code.

You can do this by adding a Version Control System repository to your Composer config:

Note: Your theme will require a composer.json file with config which defines it as a WordPress theme. You will need a similar setup if you are creating a private plugin, but you will set the type as "type": "wordpress-plugin".

Repository SSH Keys

Usually if you are using a VCS repository, such as GitHub, it will be private and you will need to allow Composer to authenticate with the repository. The easiest way to do this is via SSH keys.

To give Docker access to these SSH keys you will need to copy them into the web container and amend the user privileges:

Once this is done you can run composer install with no interaction docker-compose exec web composer install --no-dev --no-interaction.

Note: The keys will be stored in a separate Docker volume so will persist even if you delete the container.

Managing MySQL

On occasions you will need to interact with MySQL (MariaDB) directly and you can do this via a SQL GUI tool such as SequelPro or HeidiSQL. But you may also wish to interact with the database via the CLI which can be done easily via docker-compose.

You may also wish to import data into the database via the CLI too, Dusty makes this easy. When you create Dusty via docker-compose a directory called data is created both locally and in the container. You can then drop SQL files into the local data directory and they will be available to the container. Then you can access the container and import the files.

You can also dump data back out to the local data directory in a similar way.

Useful Resources

• Chris Sherry's talk on WordPress and Composer at PHP UK.

Cat Tax

This is Dusty, AKA Princess Dustle-Puff, Ruler of All Things Soft and Scratchable, I named this repo after her. She is sat in my code chair, I think she's trying to help...