Ant/PHP scripts to sync dev and live environments

What does it do?

This project contains a collection of Ant and PHP scripts designed to simplify switching between dev and live WordPress websites. With these scripts, a developer can use a single command to download or upload a WordPress site, along with its database. This way, the site can be worked on without risk to the live site content.

Warning

1. THIS SCRIPT DELETES! [Source control your files and data and/or make backups first!]
2. It is also a few years old and there may be better ways to achieve this now.

Functionality

• Allows a developer to work offline using a full copy of a WordPress website including the PHP source and database.
• Allows a developer to upload the new source code only or source code and data. A backup is also created during upload.

Motivation

• Working on a live site directly is rarely advisable.
• Recent, real CMS content helps with offline development.
• Switching between live and dev environments increases the risk of deletion or corruption of live content.
• Shared-hosting packages, as used by many WordPress sites, provide limited tool sets for updating source code and data. FTP is often the only option - automating this process saves time and cuts down on errors.
• The content on the developer machine becomes outdated. It is very useful to be able to download the latest version of everything quickly and reliably. Especially, if ad-hoc coding changes have been performed directly on the server by 'someone else'.
• Being able to cleanly sync code allows for easier source-control and identification of bug causes.

Requirements

• Ant is installed on the developer machine with the optional FTP jars.
• A local and remote MySQL database.

Usage

Setup

Simply download these scripts to the root directory of your WordPress application.

Starting with a 'live' project.

1. Configure variables in build.properties.
2. Download the live site: ant download
3. Work on the website locally.
4. Upload the changes. ant upload

Starting with a 'local' project.

// TODO

Common problems

Problem: failed to create task or type ftp Cause: the class org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP was not found.

FTP has not been configured for Ant. Please see the Ant documentation for details of the optional resources needed by FTP.