(DEPRECATED) WP Snapshots

THIS PROJECT IS DEPREACTED IN FAVOR OF THE NEW SNAPSHOTS BUILT AS A WP CLI COMMAND.

A project sharing tool for WordPress.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• 2.0 Upgrade Notice
• Installation
  • Windows-specific Installation
• Configure
• Usage
• Identity Access Management and Security
• PII
• Troubleshooting

Overview

WP Snapshots is a project sharing tool for WordPress. Operated via the command line, this tool empowers developers to easily push snapshots of projects into the cloud for sharing with team members. Team members can pull snapshots, either creating new WordPress development environments or into existing installs such that everything "just works". No more downloading files, matching WordPress versions, SQL dumps, fixing table prefixes, running search/replace commands, etc. WP Snapshots even works with multisite.

WP Snapshots stores snapshots in a centralized repository (AWS). Users setup up WP Snapshots with their team's AWS credentials. Users can then push, pull, and search for snapshots. When a user pushes a snapshot, an instance of their current environment (wp-content/, database, etc.) is pushed to Amazon and associated with a particular project slug. When a snapshot is pulled, files are pulled from the cloud either by creating a new WordPress install with the pulled database or by replacing wp-content/ and intelligently merging the database. WP Snapshots will ensure your local version of WordPress matches the snapshot..

A snapshot can contain files, the database, or both. Snapshot files (wp-content/) and WordPress database tables are stored in Amazon S3. General snapshot meta data is stored in Amazon DynamoDB.

Upgrade

WP Snapshots 2.0+ allows users to store database and files independently. As such, some snapshots may only have files or vice-versa. Therefore, WP Snapshots pre 2.0 will break when attempting to pull a 2.0+ snapshot that contains only files or database. WP Snapshots 2.0 works perfectly with older snapshots. If you are running an older version of WP Snapshots, you should upgrade immediately.

Install

WP Snapshots is easiest to use as a global Composer package. It's highly recommended you run WP Snapshots from WITHIN your dev environment (inside VM or container). Assuming you have Composer/MySQL installed and SSH keys setup within GitHub/10up organiziation, do the following:

Install WP Snapshots as a global Composer package via Packagist:

composer global require 10up/wpsnapshots

If global Composer scripts are not in your path, add them:

export PATH=~/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH

If you are using VVV, add global Composer scripts to your path with this command:

export PATH=~/.config/composer/vendor/bin:$PATH

Configure

WP Snapshots currently relies on AWS to store files and data. As such, you need to connect to a "repository" hosted on AWS. We have compiled instructions on how to setup a repository on AWS.

• wpsnapshots configure <repository> [--region] [--aws_key] [--aws_secret] [--user_name] [--user_email]

  This command sets up WP Snapshots with AWS info and user info. If the optional arguments are not passed to the command, the user will be promted to enter them, with the exception of region which will default to us-west-1.

  Example Usage With Prompts :

  wpsnapshots configure 10up
  

  Example Usage Without Prompts (No Interaction) :

  wpsnapshots configure yourcompany --aws_key=AAABBBCCC --aws_secret=AAA111BBB222 --user_name="Jane Smith" --user_email="noreply@yourcompany.com"
  

If WP Snapshots has not been setup for your team/company, you'll need to create the WP Snapshots repository:

wpsnapshots create-repository <repository>

If a repository has already been created, this command will do nothing.

Usage

WP Snapshots revolves around pushing, pulling, and searching for snapshots. WP Snapshots can push any setup WordPress install. WP Snapshots can pull any snapshot regardless of whether WordPress is setup or not. If WordPress is not setup during a pull, WP Snapshots will guide you through setting it up.

Documentation for each operation is as follows:

• wpsnapshots push [<snapshot-id>] [--exclude_uploads] [--exclude] [--scrub] [--path] [--db_host] [--db_name] [--db_user] [--db_password] [--verbose] [--small] [--slug] [--description] [--include_files] [--include_db]

  This command pushes a snapshot of a WordPress install to the repository. The command will return a snapshot ID once it's finished that you could pass to a team member. When pushing a snapshot, you can include files and/or the database.

  WP Snapshots scrubs all user information by default including names, emails, and passwords.

  Pushing a snapshot will not replace older snapshots with the same name. There's been discussion on this. It seems easier and safer not to delete old snapshots (otherwise we have to deal with permissions).

  --small will take 250 posts from each post type along with the associated terms and post meta and delete the rest of the data. This will modify your local database so be careful.

• wpsnapshots pull <snapshot-id> [--path] [--db_host] [--db_name] [--db_user] [--db_password] [--verbose] [--include_files] [--include_db] [--overwrite_local_copy]

  This command pulls an existing snapshot from the repository into your current WordPress install replacing your database and/or wp-content directory entirely. If a WordPress install does not exist, it will prompt you to create it. The command will interactively prompt you to map URLs to be search and replaced. If the snapshot is a multisite, you will have to map URLs interactively for each blog in the network. This command will also (optionally) match your current version of WordPress with the snapshots.

  After pulling, you can login as admin with the user wpsnapshots, password password.

• wpsnapshots search <search-text>... [--format]

  This command searches the repository for snapshots. <search-text> will be compared against project names and authors. Multiple queries can be used to search snapshots in different projects. Searching for "*" will return all snapshots.

  --format will render output using selected format. Supported formats are table and json. Default value is table.

• wpsnapshots delete <snapshot-id> [--verbose]

  This command deletes a snapshot from the repository.

Identity Access Management and Security

Snapshots is intended to store development environments. It was not meant to be a secure solution to store sensitive production data in the cloud.

Snapshots relies on AWS for access management. Each snapshot is associated with a project slug. Using AWS IAM, specific users can be restricted to specific projects. It is your responsibility to ensure your AWS cloud environment is properly secured.

PII

Snapshots automatically scrubs user information when creating a snapshot. Scrubbed data only includes standard WordPress data e.g. user name, passwords, some user meta, etc. Certain plugins or custom code my store PII elsewhere. It is strongly recommended you review your project for PII (personal identifable information) before pushing snapshots to AWS.

Troubleshooting

• WP Snapshots can't establish a connection to the database

  This can happen if you are calling WP Snapshots outside of your dev environment running in a VM or container. WP Snapshots reads database credentials from wp-config.php. In order to connect to your database from your host machine, the database host address will need to be different. For VVV it's 192.168.50.4, for WP Local Docker, it's 127.0.0.1. You can pass a host override via the command line using the --db_host option. For VVV, you also might need to pass in a special database user and password like so --db_user=external --db_password=external. We recommend running WP Snapshots from inside your development environment.

• I received the error: env: mysqldump: No such file or directory

  You don't have mysqldump installed. This is most likely because you are running WP Snapshots from outside your container or VM. Either install mysqldump or run WP Snapshots inside your container or VM.

• During a pull, MySQL is timing or erroring out while replacing the database.

  If you are pulling a massive database, there are all sorts of memory and MySQL optimization issues you can encounter. Try running WP Snapshots as root (--db_user=root) so it can attempt to tweak settings for the large import.

• wpsnapshots search displays signature expired error.

  This happens when your local system clock is skewed. To fix:

  • If you're using VVV, try vagrant reload
  • If you're using Docker, try docker-machine ssh default 'sudo ntpclient -s -h pool.ntp.org'

• wpsnapshots push or pull is crashing.

  A fatal error is most likely occuring when bootstrapping WordPress. Look at your error log to see what's happening. Often this happens because of a missing PHP class (Memcached) which is a result of not running WP Snapshots inside your environment (container or VM).

Windows

WP Snapshots has been used successfully inside Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Support Level

Active: 10up is actively working on this, and we expect to continue work for the foreseeable future including keeping tested up to the most recent version of WordPress. Bug reports, feature requests, questions, and pull requests are welcome.

Like what you see?