Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasdae | Hacker News Reader

I work using wordpress and I've been working like this practically my entire career. I use programs like winscp to edit code directly in production over ftp or scp. If the site goes down, well, boo hoo.

A way of avoiding problems or hiding new features that are currently in development is wrapping the code in... if server remote addr == my ip... do this... else do nothing. Works fine!

View on HN

That’s terrifying and I think Wordpress can be stored in Git and deployed by CI/CD today.

https://spinupwp.com/advanced-wordpress-deployments-with-bud...

If all you’re ever doing is WinSCP and editing on a production server at what point does lack of experience with Git and how software is built elsewhere become a liability in career terms because interviewing examples are hard?

For modern WordPress, the roots.io ecosystem is really great (https://roots.io/), notably Bedrock for things like this:

https://roots.io/bedrock/

At my last company the senior dev had all 5 wordpress employees do this. FTP, edit the files directly. He simply did not know how to use git, and did not care to learn.

To be fair, it did work. Nothing ever blew up. We had hourly backups for all the major clients. Onboarding or switching between clients had zero startup costs, its literally just FTP and php files.

Happy I left though.

Many PHP hosters allow git syncing for a few years. One issue are co-workers/clients who change things directly via FTP. Having a local copy with docker (maybe vscode containers) works very well for testing. I assume OP has a lot of clients who do not have the budget for test environments which happens a lot. The SFTP workflow does work quite well, there are plugins for sublime text / vscode.

While not ideal, if websites aren't transactional or on the critical path of business, short, occasional downtime can be tolerable. Facebook used to push fresh PHP code straight to production multiple times per day often with obvious side effects. Who cares? It's just Facebook.

You can use an "Apache server in a box", ie something like XAMPP or WAMP or whatever it's called nowadays and run an Apache web server with PHP locally, even if you're on Windows. There's no excuse to be a cowboy like that and edit on prod.

When you have to edit something different in a different site every day you can't do that because you would waste most of the time replicating the site locally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com