Does bedrock/trellis disable the ability to add/install plugins via admin?

bedrock
#1

I’m noticing that my bedrock/trellis site has lost the menu option to add a new plugin in the admin area.

I fully understand why this is a good thing - I’m managing plugins via composer now. However, just for the moment, on a staging site, I need to add a plugin via admin.

Is this still possible? A config setting perhaps?

2 Likes
#2

DISALLOW_FILE_MODS is set to true in staging and production environments by default. See here: https://github.com/roots/bedrock/blob/master/config/environments/production.php#L7

Changing it to false will allow you to install/update plugins via the WP admin dashboard.

6 Likes
User Role Problem on remote
#3

or you could SSH into the server and use WP-CLI to install the plugin from the command line

Benefits: don’t need to commit plugins to the repo only to remove them afterwards

Caveats: the plugin would need to be reinstalled if a new deployment is ran

2 Likes
#4

Good call @paul_tibbetts - I’ll keep that in mind too.

In my case, I’ll sometimes want to give non-technical people the option to try out plugins they’ve heard about, to see if they’ll work nicely on the site. Obviously I won’t let them do this on production, but I could allow it on staging, or maybe a ‘sandbox’ server, if I don’t want to lose parity on staging. So allowing plugin installation via the admin area is useful here.

2 Likes
#5

How do you prevent the deploy from removing the plugins? I have a client with so many commercial plugins that I have not figured out how to handle yet.

#6

I know this may not be “the Bedrock way” because it decouples the management of plugins/themes/updates from Composer, but for clients where I cannot (or do not) want to maintain active management/control of their site following completion of the project I make the following modifications to bedrock at the outset of the project which subsequently allows plugins/themes/updates to be managed via the Admin yet still allows me to perform trellis deploys – without removing/overwriting plugins!

  1. Add the following to both production.php (create if necessary) and staging.php (if desired) files in site/config/environments/ to allow theme/plugin/updates via the Admin:
    Config::define('DISALLOW_FILE_MODS', false);
  2. Next, add the following to trellis/roles/deploy/defaults/main.yml under the project_shared_children heading (line 33 ATTOW), which will create new themes and plugins directories in /srv/www/example.com/shared/, symlinked to the themes and plugins directories in site/web/app/:
    project_shared_children
  [...]
  - path: web/app/plugins
    src: plugins
  - path: web/app/themes
    src: themes
    • From the next deploy onwards all themes and plugins installed via the WordPress Admin will be written to /srv/www/example.com/shared/[themes/plugins], which is retained across deployments!

Once these changes have been implemented you can deploy at your leisure, assured that themes and plugins won’t be overwritten or removed!

Note: if you want to shim this in to an existing installation just mv the plugins and themes from your previous release (/srv/www/example.com/releases/[release -1]/web/app/[plugins/themes]/*) into the newly created /srv/www/example.com/shared/[themes/plugins]/ directories after deploy.

9 Likes
Allowing Updates on Production Site
Deploy own themes and plugins, but don't overwrite other plugins/themes that are installed through WP Admin dashboard
#7

Thanks a lot for this, very helpful @gnowland!

It looks like once this is done, we will lose the ability to manage plugins with composer afterwards?

I was looking for a way to keep my composer plugins just as is, plus giving the client ability to add plugins by themselves. Something like:
Plugins added through admin -> goes in shared/plugins
Plugins added through composer -> goes in web/app/plugins as normal.

But after doing as above, the only the plugins in the shared folder worked.

#8

@faahim, did you find an answer to your question above?

I ask as I am about to move a theme (Thrive Theme Builder) to shared as described by @gnowland

#9

This related answer may help:

#10

In case anyone is looking for a solution for this - instead of setting the whole plugin and theme directories as project_shared_children, I instead only did this with the plugins I have to install through the wp dashboard. see example:

project_shared_children:
  - path: "{{ project_public_path }}/{{ project_upload_path }}"
    src: uploads
  - path: web/app/plugins/give
    src: plugins/give
  - path: web/app/plugins/wpai-acf-add-on
    src: plugins/wpai-acf-add-on
  - path: web/app/plugins/wp-all-import-pro
    src: plugins/wp-all-import-pro

please note that this only works, if you set the directory before installing the plugin, of if you move over the installed plugin manually

#11

But even those plugins should be installable using composer, as composer can also extract archive files (as zip) into a directory - or put the premium plugin code into a private repository.