Deploying WordPress application using VSTS and Azure – part one
This post is the first part of two blog posts, describing how to setup a CI/CD pipeline using VSTS for deploying a dockerized custom WordPress website working with Azure WebApp for Containers and Azure Database for MySQL.
The Motivation
The main motivation for building a WordPress CI/CD pipeline is the fact that WordPress is limited in supporting dynamic configuration to allow easy modification between different environments. Some values are hardcoded in the WordPress MySQL database. This limitation causing a time consuming task which limits our ability to deploy fast and more frequently.
The Idea
We will have four environments: local, dev, test and production. The local environment is for the developer that will run the docker images locally, commit the required changes, and will push the code to the master branch once they completed their work. The push action will initiate a CI process, which will build and push a new docker image to our Azure Container Registry. The base image of this docker image will be the WordPress image from the docker hub. As part of the dockerfile, a copy action will be executed for copying the new content into the new docker image.
After the CI process completion a CD process will start automatically, using Azure Database for MySQL as the WordPress DB each environment will have a separate database. For updating the hardcoded values DB, we will perform a DB export from a previous environment into a SQL script file. Execute find & replace will restore the new SQL file into the next environment DB. Also part of this process we will use Azure Application Insights WordPress plugin for logging and monitoring purposes.
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