Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog

This is the last post in a five part series that covers the basics of getting WordPress up and running on Engine Yard. In the first post, we covered how to get a basic install deployed. In the second post we introduced a way to make modifications locally, and freeze them, so that they can be deployed to a cluster of cattle servers. In the third post we looked at two approaches to installing plugins locally, and got an S3 bucket set up to serve images so that we’re not relying on the filesystem, which is ephemeral. Then, in the fourth post we set up New Relic for application monitoring, and CloudFlare for site speedup, analytics, and security protection.

In the previous posts in this series, we’ve covered how to get a basic install of WordPress up and running in the cloud, how to install themes, and how to install plugins. The biggest hurdle when deploying legacy applications to the cloud is dealing with the filesystem. Fortunately, by freezing the state of the filesystem before we deploy, we can work around this. And by adapting our code to write to external data storage, we can remove our run-time dependency on the file system.

In the previous post in this series, we looked at how to install a WordPress theme manually to a WordPress instance deployed in the cloud and in the first post in the series, how to configure WordPress to run on Engine Yard. In this post, we’ll look at a contrasting technique, using the admin interface to install an Amazon Web Services Simple Storage System (S3) plugin.

In the previous post in this series, we explained how to deploy WordPress to a production cloud environment. As an app which wasn’t specifically designed for the cloud, WordPress has to be handled specially to make this work. In the conclusion to a previous series, we outlined a solution that does this with the minimum effort and yet great reliability. In the third post in this series, we look at a contrasting technique, using the admin interface to install an Amazon Web Services Simple Storage System (S3) plugin.

This is the first post in a series that will show you how to configure WordPress to run on Engine Yard, a cloud hosting provider. As we go, we’ll discuss common issues and the best practices for addressing them.