WordPress Quickstart Format

[adamziel]

Snapshots and Blueprints go hand in hand. Let's find a convenient way for a developer to type in a single command, like wp up, and get a WordPress site built / served based on the current directory contents.

For example, I could have just some themes, plugins, etc:

    ./wp-config.php
    ./wp-content
    ./wp-content/database
    ./wp-content/themes/twentytwentythree
    ./wp-content/plugins/gutenberg
    ./wp-content/plugins/woocommerce
    ./wp-content/mu-plugins
    … etc …

Or, I could have just a Blueprint:

    ./blueprint.json

Or I could have both:

    ./blueprint.json
    ./wp-content/plugins/gutenberg

This is, more or less, what wp-env and wp-now do today. They could converge into a single tool.

Open questions

• Should the WordPress directory structure be required?
• Should the local directory change as a result of wp up? E.g. should the downloaded themes be unzipped in wp-content/themes? And should there be a wp reset command to restore the original site? And how it would work under the hood?
• Should wp up create a new, ephemeral site? Or always the same site running from that local directory? Or should that be a matter of the runtime adapter used? Or a CLI switch? Like --temporary or --permanent?

cc @danielbachhuber @noahtallen @sejas @dmsnell @youknowriad @mtias

[noahtallen]

One interesting feature of wp-env is that if you run it in a directory containing a plugin or theme, you'll automatically get a site running with that plugin or theme with no configuration necessary.

IMO, the benefit of not requiring the WordPress directory structure is that it's easy to use the tool for a monorepo which might have lots of projects, where code might be organized differently. (plus, you often only care about the stuff under wp-content, not the other core code.) As a result, wp-env has a separate "hidden" directory in the home folder which contains any downloaded themes/plugins, and then everything is mapped together with Docker. The nice part about this is the downloaded plugin is treated like a true dependency that you aren't supposed to modify. (And therefore it doesn't matter if it gets overwritten.)