Keeping Development and Production in Sync

[kevinb]

How does everyone keep their production and development installs in sync?

At work I manage a larger site (~270 pages). We are planning a significant update to the site structure and pages to improve the UX. The problem is this will take several months and I find it hard to keep the dev site content in sync with the live site. I also want to use Pro in order to utilize the header builder and, until the header/footer user template import/export system is implemented, the only way to move from local dev to live is to migrate the full site.

What are your X/Pro workflows for larger sites/longer dev cycles?

[kory]

Hey, @kevinb!

Perhaps WP Migrate DB Pro could be something that fits the bill. It will allow you to push and pull between your development and production environments along with a few other goodies like a quick find and replace. All-in-One WP Migration is another plugin that I know some of the guys here like to use for certain projects.

Those are two of the main plugins I hear a lot about for this type of thing and have used occasionally when needed. I’d certainly be curious to hear from anyone else who might know of other solutions in this space.

[kevinb]

Thanks, I’m familiar with WP Migrate DB Pro and have used All-in-One WP Migration quite a bit. The devs behind the WP Migrate DB also have a syncing plugin/service in alpha (mergebot) and I’ve kept an eye on VersionPress (disallowed on my host). I’m seeing that local/production site syncing is a unicorn in the WP world. As the site I mentioned in my OP will undergo major structure/hierarchy changes, I think I will need to keep track of content changes and update manually unfortunately. I do use the plugin Stream, which keeps a running log of what changes are made site wide and by whom. Though it doesn’t track content changes. It at least can show me when a page or post was changed and I can do a diff between the local and production versions.

[kory]

You’ve definitely got a lot more experience in this arena it seems! Most of the projects I find myself working on don’t tend to have a lot of “designed” content in the WordPress editor, so I’ve not ran into this very much (and when I do, the occasional manual update gets the job done as it doesn’t need to be as constant as it sounds in your situation).

I’d be curious to know a little more about each plugin and service you mentioned above and what you like about them and what didn’t quite cut if for you. I would have thought WP Migrate DB Pro to be perfect based on your description of needs, but it seems like maybe you’ve hit some roadbumps with them.

I’m sure there are plenty of other users out there as well who run into similar situations and it’d be great to have a better idea on what you’ve found works best so far!

[kevinb]

To be honest, I haven’t used WP Migrate DB Pro. I’ve only toyed with the free version, which doesn’t allow the push/pull that the paid version does, you need to manually import the dbs into MySQL between installs. There is a fork of the Pro version that was put out a couple years ago, named WP Sync DB. It hasn’t been receiving many updates over the past year, but still seems to work with the current version of WP.

I’ve tested with WP Sync DB and it works for the most part but not 100% with my main work site. I have a smaller site that it seemed to do fine with.

There is an issue where the two sites need to have the same exact structure. If you have new pages or posts in a dev site that aren’t in the production site, there can be issues. If you’re looking to restructure the site hierarchy, keeping things in sync can be quite a challenge.

I’ve been keeping an eye on VersionPress since it launched. It uses Git to basically put your whole site under version control and allows you to rollback changes just like in plain Git. I can’t use it on the work site because we host with WP Engine and they disallow VersionPress due to it needing more server-side config to install.

Mergebot is from the developers of WP Migrate DB Pro.Its in a late beta stage. It works by tracking changes on both the production and development sites via a plugin installed in both places and stores the change data in a paid web app service. When it comes time to push the changes from the dev install, MergeBot merges both dbs keeping the newer changes on the live site intact.

For the most part I’ve used All-in-One WP Migration or manually moved sites between servers and local/staging/live. AIOM work well for the most part, but has problems if working on a slow server. Once MergeBot is out of beta, I’d like to check it out. I’m not sure how much they’ll be charging. I would imagine somewhat more than for WP Migrate DB Pro.

[kory]

Great insights! Mergebot sounds really awesome, I’ll be looking forward to checking into that a little more down the road. Thanks for taking the time to give such awesome feedback and best of luck in your continued quest for the perfect development/production database syncing setup.