Easily zip up your Wordpress plugin into a .zip file ready for shipping.
Installation is best done with Composer.
composer require --dev makeweb/shipper
Note: The --dev flag is important as this is a development dependency which should not be shipped with your distributed plugin files.
Once installed, you will have access to a new terminal command vendor/bin/ship which will automatically produce the shippable zip file for your plugin. To run the shipper script, from the root directory of your project just type:
vendor/bin/ship
To add a deployment script to your project create a file called 'deploy.php' in the root of your project and add whatever code there you would like to add. This will be called by the Shipper.php class and from the scope of that class which means you can use any methods on that class with the $this variable.
To deploy after shipping use the flag --deploy (or -d for brevity).
vendor/bin/ship --deploy
You might want to create an alias so you can use something like ship to save remembering and typing all those additional characters. To do this on a Mac, add the following to your ~/.bash_profile file (or create the file and add it, if it does not already exist):
alias ship="vendor/bin/ship"
Then type source ~/.bash_profile or open a new terminal window to make the alias available. You will only need to do this once.
After this you will be able to run the shipper script from the root directory of your project with just:
ship
To automatically remove files or directories from the distribution version of your plugin before zipping, list each file or directory on a new line in a file called .shipignore in your project root. To copy the default .shipignore file to your project root, use the command vendor/bin/ship publish (ship publish if you have an alias set up).