# How I sync wordpress databases between development, staging, and production

**URL:** https://discourse.roots.io/t/how-i-sync-wordpress-databases-between-development-staging-and-production/8576
**Category:** archived 🗄
**Created:** 2017-01-17T07:12:45Z
**Posts:** 4

## Post 1 by @kculmback — 2017-01-17T07:12:45Z

This is a topic I’ve seen discussed a few times, but nothing quite ever fit my needs or I simply couldn’t get it to work (I’m new to this!). A lot of people seem to be using [capistrano-wpcli](https://github.com/lavmeiker/capistrano-wpcli) or [WP Migrate DB Pro](https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-migrate-db-pro/). However, I couldn’t get Capistrano-WPCLI to work and I didn’t feel like paying for WP Migrate.

Enter [this topic](https://discourse.roots.io/t/local-staging-deploy-setup-help/7073). The discussion here gave me the idea and the necessary commands to write a simple shell script that I could use to automate syncing databases between environments as needed.

For example, the script below syncs the development database to the staging website. \*this assumes you’re using Trellis and Bedrock

> ```
> cd ~/path/to/site/example.com/trellis
> vagrant ssh <<EOF
> cd /srv/www/example.com/current
> wp db export
> exit
> EOF
> cd ~/path/to/site/example.com/site
> scp example_com_development.sql web@staging.example.com:/srv/www/example.com/current
> rsync -azP web/app/uploads/ web@staging.example.com:/srv/www/example.com/shared/uploads/
> ssh -t -t web@staging.example.com <<EOF
> cd /srv/www/example.com/current
> wp db import example_com_development.sql
> wp search-replace example.dev staging.example.com
> rm example_com_development.sql
> exit
> EOF
> ```

Now I’m sure there are definitely ways that this can be improved and extended! I’m pretty new to this and even this simpler script took me a while and many different articles to piece together.

One drawback is that this will rewrite the wordpress users for the staging/production websites, which means you need to make sure your development vault.yml is encrypted if you’re on a public git repo. I’m sure it’d also be wise to extend the the script so that it creates a backup of the database of whichever environment you’re syncing to.

Eventually I’d like to combine it with @Twansparant’s [Trellis DB Sync](https://github.com/Twansparant/trellis-db-sync) so that I could also keep databases synced between computers.

I hope this may be of use to someone! Slash I’d definitely welcome any feedback anyone has. This is a simple approach but it does the trick :slight_smile:

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## Post 3 by @kculmback — 2018-02-14T20:07:33Z

For those who end up here in the future, I’ve been using [this tool](https://github.com/valentinocossar/trellis-database-uploads-migration) to sync uploads and databases between development, staging, and production! It works great, is actively maintained, and is easy to drop in to any trellis installation.

[https://github.com/valentinocossar/trellis-database-uploads-migration](https://github.com/valentinocossar/trellis-database-uploads-migration)

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## Post 4 by @ben — 2022-02-26T03:19:46Z