Managing WordPress via git

Posted on 3 October, 2014 at 14:31 UTC by fred

I reorganized my self-hosted WordPress system to use git to manage the WordPress code and to move the content outside of the WordPress directory. That way I should be able to do a simple git pull and git checkout $newversion to update my WordPress. I’m also keeping my content directory under change management (separately) so that I can update plugins through the web and be able to roll back.

$HOME/blog/wordpress is a git clone of git@github.com:WordPress/WordPress.git. I make no local changes in this. In particular, all of wp-content is unchanged (I make it unwriteable by Apache to be sure).
$HOME/blog/content is a copy of the wp-content of my site (prior to moving it outside the wordpress code). It contains the usual: plugins, themes, uploads. It’s all writeable by Apache so that I can update plugins and themes through the web.
$HOME/blog/wp-config.php is the usual config file (WordPress looks in the parent directory for it). It’s standard except for two settings:
```
define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', '/home/fred/blog/content');  
define('WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://fred.yankowski.com/content');
```
/etc/apache2/conf.d/wordpress.conf defines the VirtualHost for the wordpress site. It has an alias to support special location of the content. (It also has the mod_rewrite rules for permalinks so that I don’t need an .htaccess file in the wordpress code).
```
DocumentRoot /home/fred/blog/wordpress
Alias /content /home/fred/blog/content
```