Remote Server Setup

Setting up remote servers (usually staging or production environments) is similar to the local development setup with a few additional requirements and steps.

In development, Trellis handles everything for you. It automatically creates a server (Vagrant virtual machine), provisions it, installs WordPress, and syncs your local files to the VM. For remote servers, the workflow is a little different with two new separate concepts:

• Provision
• Deploy

Before getting to those, there's some additional requirements as well.

Dependencies

The Trellis installation instructions are optimized for a quick start using Vagrant. For deploying and provisioning remote servers, we need to ensure all of Trellis' dependencies (mainly Ansible) are installed on your local/host machine.

• Trellis CLI
• Manual

If you're using trellis-cli, just re-run the following command to ensure your project is initialized and the dependencies are installed:

$ trellis init

Run both the following commands in your local trellis project directory:

1. Install Ansible and other dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt
2. Install Galaxy roles: ansible-galaxy install -r galaxy.yml

Server requirements

1. You need a server running a bare/stock version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal). If you're using a host such as DigitalOcean that lets you pick an OS to start with, then select the Ubuntu 20.04 option.

Shared hosts

Trellis cannot be used on a shared host. Trellis requires a dedicated server if you want to use it for provisioning and deployments.

2. You need to be able to connect to your Ubuntu server from your local computer via SSH. We highly suggest doing this via SSH keys so you don't have to specify a password every time. Many hosts like DigitalOcean offer to automatically add your SSH key when creating a server so take advantage of that. Or follow a guide such as this one (opens new window).

Once you have a Ubuntu server up and running, you can provision it.

Provision

Provisioning a server means to set it up with the necessary software and configuration to run a WordPress site. For Trellis this means things like: installing MariaDB, installing Nginx, configuring Nginx, creating a database, etc.

Trellis has two main playbooks (opens new window): dev.yml and server.yml. As mentioned in local development, Vagrant automatically runs the dev.yml playbook for us.

For remote servers, you provision a server via the server.yml playbook. This leaves you with a server prepared to run a WordPress site, but without the actual codebase yet.

Before provisioning your server, there's a little more configuration to do. First determine the environment you want to configure; after development, you'll likely be creating a production or staging environment.

Configuration

1. Copy your wordpress_sites from your working development site in group_vars/development/wordpress_sites.yml to group_vars/<environment>/wordpress_sites.yml.
2. Modify your site and add the necessary settings for remote servers since they have a few more settings than local development. Also see the Passwords docs.
3. Add your server hostname to hosts/<environment> (replacing your_server_hostname).
4. Specify public SSH keys for users in group_vars/all/users.yml. See the SSH Keys docs.
5. Consider setting sshd_permit_root_login: false in group_vars/all/security.yml. See the Security docs.

Now you're ready to provision your server. Ansible connects to the remote server via SSH so run the following command from your local machine:

• Trellis CLI
• Manual

$ trellis provision <environment>

$ ansible-playbook server.yml -e env=<environment>

Re-provisioning

Re-provisioning is always assumed to be a safe operation. When you make changes to your Trellis configuration, you should provision your remote servers again to apply the changes:

• Trellis CLI
• Manual

Run the following from any directory within your project:

$ trellis provision <environment>

Run the following from your project's trellis directory:

$ ansible-playbook server.yml -e env=<environment>

You can also provision with specific tags to only run the relevant roles:

• Trellis CLI
• Manual

Run the following from any directory within your project:

$ trellis provision --tags users <environment>

Run the following from your project's trellis directory:

$ ansible-playbook server.yml -e env=<environment> --tags=users

Deploy

In development it's easy to get your site/codebase onto the VM through synced folders. However for remote servers, we need to deploy first.

Deploys are done in Trellis by running the deploy.yml playbook. This gets your codebase onto the server by cloning it from a Git repository. It also takes cares of things like: running Composer, creating config files, reloading Nginx, etc.

• Trellis CLI
• Manual

Run the following from any directory within your project:

$ trellis deploy <environment>

Run the following from your project's trellis directory:

$ ansible-playbook deploy.yml -e "site=<site name> env=<environment>"

Resources

• Using Trellis to Provision and Deploy to DigitalOcean Droplets (opens new window)