How to setup WordPress on Heroku with the Heroku Buildpack for PHP

This will set up a fresh WordPress install on Heroku with the newly released Heroku Buildpack for PHP.

• nginx - Nginx for serving web content.
• PHP - PHP-FPM for process management.
• WordPress - Downloaded from the Github WordPress Repo.
• MySQL - ClearDB for the MySQL backend.
• Sendgrid - Sendgrid for the email backend.
• MemCachier - MemCachier for the memcached backend.
• New Relic- Monitoring

Getting started

Use the Deploy to Heroku button, or use the old fashioned way described below.

Clone this repository into a new directory.

Create your Heroku app.

heroku apps:create application-name --stack cedar --buildpack https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php --region eu

--region eu is for deploying your app in the European region.

or on to add this buildpack to an existing app, run

heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php

Before you push to Heroku make sure to add the following add-ons.

heroku addons:add cleardb
heroku addons:add sendgrid
heroku addons:add memcachier
heroku addons:add papertrail
heroku addons:add newrelic

Define your AWS keys for the AWS S3 Media Uploader plugin.

heroku config:set AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=123
heroku config:set AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=123

Some default configurations. WP_CACHE=true will enable Batcache with the Memcachier addon.

heroku config:set DISABLE_WP_CRON=true
heroku config:set WP_CACHE=true

Deploy your WordPress site to Heroku.

git add .
git commit -am "Initial commit"
git push heroku master

Overview

└── public                 # Heroku webroot
    ├── content            # The wp-content directory. Renamed to content to avoid confusion with wp-content - and it looks prettier
    │   ├── plugins        # Plugins
    │   ├── mu-plugins     # Required plugins
    │   └── themes         # Your custom themes
    │
    └── wp                 # Where the actual WordPress install will be installed by Composer

Upgrade WordPress

Update the version number for the WordPress package in composer.json, then run composer update and commit the changes in composer.json and composer.lock. Do not upgrade WordPress from the admin-interface as it will not survive a restart or dyno change.

Setup local development

Make sure you have Composer installed first, then run

composer install

Create a local .env file.

CLEARDB_DATABASE_URL=mysql://root:123abc@127.0.0.1/my_wordpress_heroku_database_name

or install the heroku config plugin from https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-config and pull your environment variables from Heroku. The second option is to use the provided local-sample-config.php and rename it local-config.php. Update it with your local MySQL credentials, and you're good to go.

NOTE: If you don't have a command-line mysql accessible and working, Mac/Homebrew users can brew install mysql and then follow the directions to have launchd start mysql at login. I believe the default username is root and the default password is blank.

Install PHP 5.5 on Mac OS X with Homebrew if you don't already have it installed.

brew install --with-fpm php55

Follow the instructions in the output to complete the setup. Most importantly check your .bash_profile or .zshrc and make sure you've set your paths correctly.

brew install php55-mcrypt
brew install nginx

Open a new shell and run php -v and php-fpm -v and make sure they both read PHP 5.5… If you're still on PHP 5.4 then check your paths again. Make sure /usr/local/sbin is before /usr/sbin in your PATH:

Mountain Lion comes with php-fpm pre-installed, to ensure you are using the brew version you need to make sure /usr/local/sbin is before /usr/sbin in your PATH:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

Add this below Heroku Toolbelt setting in .bashrc or .bash_profile to swap the PHP you use on the command line.

export PATH="$(brew --prefix homebrew/php/php55)/bin:$PATH"

Now to start your local dev environment run to start WordPress on http://localhost:5000/

foreman start

If you don't have foreman installed, you can do so with gem install foreman assuming you have Ruby running on your system. If it fails, try adding sudo in front of the command.

Known Issues

If you try to develop locally without syncing your external MemCachier envvars you might see a 500 error or a You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. - message. Workaround is to simply remove object-cache.php and advanced-cache.php from the content dir while doing local dev. In a future release I'll try to have these files added on deploy with Composer.

Sources

This would not have been possible without the work and resources provided by the following people:

• http://mattstauffer.co/blog/laravel-on-heroku-using-a-buildpack-locally-to-mimic-your-heroku-environment-nginx
• https://github.com/mchung/wordpress-on-heroku