philipnewcomer / composerized-wordpress

An experiment in managing a complete WordPress install using Composer

Composerized WordPress

This is an experiment in managing a complete WordPress install using Composer.

WordPress itself is pulled from the official download site using Composer, and installed to its own subdirectory. Although this is a subdirectory install, the rewrite rule below will rewrite requests for WordPress Core files to the /wordpress subdirectory seamlessly, so the user does not see /wordpress/ in admin URLs.

Plugins and themes are installed to a standalone wp-content directory from WordPress Packagist. Any plugins or themes not in the .org repo can be installed using custom repositories.

Uploads are also stored in the standalone wp-content directory, and are ignored by Git.

Usage

1. Clone the repo, and configure your web server's webroot to point to the /public/ directory.
2. Add the rewrite rule below to your Nginx config.
3. Add database credentials, salts, and any custom wp-config directives to /wp-local-config.php.
4. Run composer install to get everything up and running.
5. Start developing in public/wp-content/plugins and/or /public/wp-content/themes/.

To upgrade WordPress Core or a plugin, simply update their version number(s) in composer.json and run composer update.

Nginx Rewrite Rule

In order to rewrite requests for WordPress core files to the /wordpress directory, add this directive to your Nginx config:

# Rewrite requests for WordPress core files to the /wordpress directory
rewrite ^/((wp-(admin|includes)/)+(.*))|(license\.txt|readme\.html|wp-[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+\.php|xmlrpc\.php) /wordpress/$1$5;

In a production install, these rewrites would probably be better implemented as Nginx location blocks for performance reasons, but this works and is much simpler than doing it with location blocks.

Caveats

• This setup has not yet been tested with multisite.
• WordPress auto-updates are disabled in this setup. If you're not willing to take responsibility for managing your WordPress updates, this setup probably isn't what you want to be using.
• In order to update WordPress, the WordPress version must be updated in three places in composer.json. The reason I am not installing WordPress from johnpbloch/wordpress is that I did not want the WordPress package in /wordpress to include the wp-content directory, since we're using a custom wp-content directory in /wp-content. Using a custom repository allows me to pull in the "no-content" ZIP file from the .org servers.