Hello, I am really interested in using Bedrock and want to transition from our traditional development to Bedrock.
However, I am a bit confused about how to manage the plugins and their versions in production.
We currently have safe updates turned on our cloudways server, which means that all the plugins get updated weekly.
If we are going to manage the plugins through Bedrock and Composer, will that create problems because the production and local site plugin versions are not identical?
Everything is making sense so far except for this plugin version management.
Or should I completely ignore the plugins from version management?
I tried to use Google to find some info but couldn’t find any information on it.
If you’re independently updating your production environment, Bedrock doesn’t include functionality to push updates “back” into composer. Cloudways is essentially offering an automated alternative to Bedrock’s intentionally more manual composer-based update process.
You could instead use something like GitHub’s dependabot to update your WordPress core, plugins, and themes (I have a really good example dependabot configuration in this repository) but you’d need to turn off the Cloudways updates and rely on dependabot and some kind of automated or manual deployment (see the above-linked repo again) to replace the somewhat “no-effort” solution you have from Cloudways.
Lithify is designed to facilitate a one-time conversion from traditional WordPress to Bedrock, capturing the slugs and versions currently installed in an environment and producing a composer file for them. This isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but maybe some pieces of it could help?
As stated above, Composer requires you to do some manual work but this is also a safe way to be consistent around projects and colleagues. To add to this; there are plugins out there which allow you to monitor your WordPress sites and show you their current plugin versions and such so you know which sites need updating, could be handy if you’ve a lot of sites.