Ant/PHP scripts to sync dev and live environments

What does it do?

This project contains a collection of Ant and PHP scripts designed to simplify switching between dev and live WordPress websites. With these scripts, a developer can use a single command to download or upload a WordPress site, along with its database. This way, the site can be worked on without risk to the live site content.

Warning

THIS SCRIPT DELETES! [Source control your files and data and/or make backups first!]
It is also a few years old and there may be better ways to achieve this now.

Functionality

Allows a developer to work offline using a full copy of a WordPress website including the PHP source and database.
Allows a developer to upload the new source code only or source code and data. A backup is also created during upload.

Motivation

Working on a live site directly is rarely advisable.
Recent, real CMS content helps with offline development.
Switching between live and dev environments increases the risk of deletion or corruption of live content.
Shared-hosting packages, as used by many WordPress sites, provide limited tool sets for updating source code and data. FTP is often the only option – automating this process saves time and cuts down on errors.
The content on the developer machine becomes outdated. It is very useful to be able to download the latest version of everything quickly and reliably. Especially, if ad-hoc coding changes have been performed directly on the server by ‘someone else’.
Being able to cleanly sync code allows for easier source-control and identification of bug causes.

Requirements

Ant is installed on the developer machine with the optional FTP jars.
A local and remote MySQL database.

Usage

Setup

Simply download these scripts to the root directory of your WordPress application.

Starting with a ‘live’ project.

Configure variables in build.properties.
Download the live site: ant download
Work on the website locally.
Upload the changes. ant upload

Starting with a ‘local’ project.

// TODO

Common problems

Problem: `failed to create task or type ftp Cause: the class org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP was not found.`

FTP has not been configured for Ant. Please see the Ant documentation for details of the optional resources needed by FTP.