Hi! I recently learned about the tools provided by the Roots stack for WordPress development, and I’d like to add all of the tools into my workflow for a new project. The client for the new project is pretty adamant about having the site hosted on a managed host, and I don’t know what the future will bring for me as far as being available for any emergency maintenance of a vps solution anyways. The farthest we’ve gotten in compromise has been that I would be able to stage on a vps that I currently have (and have deployed a bare WordPress multisite installation on) and then deploy to a managed host.
So, I’d like to know, primarily, if there have been any new services that may have come out that allows Trellis to be used for development seamlessly, or barring that, are there any solutions to stage with the roots tool and then deploy a managed host friendly WordPress installation to a live server?
I’ve spent much of my free time today trying to find previous postings on here that may offer a solution to my problem, but nothing precisely, and even if I found something that kinda did, the posts were, at the least, anywhere from a year to a few years old. Appreciate any help!
Kinsta is a managed WordPress hosting solution that @ben has written an article about using the Roots stack with:
You can adapt the solution that Ben lays out in the article to get the stack working with other managed hosting solutions — provided that you have SSH access with those solutions. I’ve heard of it being done with Cloudways (@alwaysblank iirc). The gist of the solution is just to use Trellis to deploy Bedrock to the server — since the server is already provisioned. You will need to lightly modify Trellis to get this to work. As well, if the host has a caching function and a must-use helper plugin to work with that, you can include it as a mu-plugin dependency in Bedrock.
I did build a working Cloudways deploy system w/ Trellis, but we ended up going in a different direction. It was essentially Ben’s Kinsta setup with a few small tweaks. Probably just about any managed service that gives you SSH access could be used with Trellis (probably not WPEngine, though).
FWIW our agency used DO droplets for nearly all our clients for years. We recently took a short detour into more managed hosting that actually ended up causing more problems than our self- managed system. Unless your client already has a managed host in mind that they trust, make sure to do your research. I haven’t used Kinsta personally, but they’re the only managed, WP-focused hosting service I’ve heard nothing but good things about.
They spin up your server and give you a web GUI to manage it. It just sits on top of Digital Ocean or Vultr one of several other services like that. They manage a bunch of OS-level stuff and provide some level of support, although I don’t know exactly what. We didn’t end up going with them.