Bedrock template project for Pantheon (standalone)

This is a template project for using bedrock with Pantheon. This project shows you how to use bedrock with Pantheon without the use of any external services for code deployment. You can either SFTP or more preferably git push your changes directly to Pantheon.

Creating a project

To create a new project, just use the following command:

$ composer create-project carlalexander/bedrock-pantheon-standalone

You'll then need to update the environment variables in your project's .env file. You can read about all the Bedrock environment variables in the Bedrock documentation.

Important changes

There are a few important changes from a regular bedrock project. You can find them explained below.

You must commit the vendor and web directories

This is the largest change from using a standard bedrock project. Pantheon doesn't support composer for installing dependencies when deploying to their servers. This means that you will need to commit the entire vendor and web directories into your git repo. You can see the original commit doing that here.

Symlink the uploads directory

This is another complicated change. Pantheon doesn't store media files inside the uploads directory, but inside another directory outside the project root called files. For media uploads to work on Pantheon, we need the web/app/uploads directory to point to that files directory.

To fix this issue, we need to convert the web/app/uploads directory to a symlink. That symlink will point the web/app/uploads directory to the files directory. This is already done for you in the project in this commit. But this means that you will need to recreate that files directory outside your project from uploads to work locally.

Location of the .env file

Similar to the issue with the uploads directory, you will need to store your .env outside the project root on the Pantheon server. The bedrock application configuration loader was updated to look for the .env file in the files/private directory where Pantheon stores all files that shouldn't be accessible to the public.

Creating the initial .env file

Unlike a standard WordPress site, a Bedrock site uses environment variables to manage sensitive credentials. These environment variables can come from different sources. The most important one being .env file which Bedrock uses instead of the standard WordPress wp-config.php file.

Pantheon won't create the initial .env file that your Bedrock site needs. You're going to have to create it yourself and upload it to the Pantheon server. To easiest way to do that is by connecting to your Pantheon server using FTP and creating the .env file.

To connect to your Pantheon site using FTP, go to your site admin panel in the Pantheon dashboard. There, you'll see a Connection Info button to the right as shown above. This will open a menu with all the credentials used to connect to your Pantheon site.

You'll find the SFTP credentials at the bottom. Use these SFTP credentials to connect to your Pantheon site. Once connected, you want to go to the files directory and create the private directory. You want to create your .env file in the private directory that you just created with the following:

WP_ENV=development
WP_SITEURL=${WP_HOME}/wp

# Generate your keys here: https://roots.io/salts.html
AUTH_KEY='generateme'
SECURE_AUTH_KEY='generateme'
LOGGED_IN_KEY='generateme'
NONCE_KEY='generateme'
AUTH_SALT='generateme'
SECURE_AUTH_SALT='generateme'
LOGGED_IN_SALT='generateme'
NONCE_SALT='generateme'

It's important that you replace all the keys with new ones that were generated here. You'll also notice that this is a more trimmed down .env file than what you're used to see with Bedrock. That's because Pantheon supplies a lot of the environment variables that we'd store in the .env file normally.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Roots team for creating and maintaining the Bedrock project. Also thanks to Andrew Taylor for his repo showing how to have advanced deployment workflow with WordPress and Pantheon.