WP Engine Announces Git Push to Deploy, Integrates Version Control with WordPress

WP Engine announces Git-Push-to-Deploy, bringing integrated version control to their Managed WordPress Hosting Platform.

Ben Metcalfe, co-founder WP Engine

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Git Push for WordPress on WP Engine’s hosting platform.  Git-push-to-deploy adds the ability to deploy your application using the open-source tool Git, and makes version control possible for developers using WordPress on WP Engine.

Git is an open-source distributed version control system initially developed by Linus Torvalds, who also developed the Linux kernel.  Until now, a core of developers have used Git informally for WordPress development because of its distributed nature, ease of branching and merging, and increased speed over the generally community accepted Subversion. But today is the first time that a WordPress hosting company has fully integrated Git-Push-To-Deploy to a hosted application.

We’re very excited about the potential of the WP Engine staging area, combined with the ability to easily update your application with a “git push” command.  Combining a powerful staging area with the best practice in version control rounds out WP Engine as a full-fledged development platform.

In 2008, Heroku released the ability to update Heroku-hosted applications via Git, appealing to a broad group of developers already familiar with the open-source tool. This feature cemented Heroku into the industry-leading platform for development that it is today.  While WP Engine still has a long way to go before it could be compared to Heroku, our mission as a company is to be “Heroku for WordPress” and provide the premiere WordPress Hosting Platform for our customers, including the industry standard in developer tools.

Getting Started with Git

If you’re hosted at WP Engine, you only need to open a support ticket and provide your SSH public key as well as any or all of your installs you’d like to access. If you’re a developer working with other developers on accounts that are not your own, we can grant access if we have the permission from the owner of those other installs. We’ll then point you to git.wpengine.com to get started with any documentation and resources you may need.

It was a rewarding challenge to get the ability to push to your application just right. We needed Git push to work the same for a customer that’s been at WP Engine for a longer period of time, as well as a new customer just coming on board. For existing customers, we were extra cautious to structure the process in such a way that the initial git push will not impact or alter any live site files that aren’t in the repository.

Currently you can use Git to push to your production and staging area at WP Engine. We’re also working on adding features similar to GitHub’s service hooks to perform post-push actions such as sending site owners a notification email, or integrating with other 3rd party services.

Git is one of those tools we’ve added that comes with the clichéd caveat, “with great power, comes great responsibility.” If you’re new to Git and hosted at WP Engine, we recommend that to make liberal use of our staging area and our checkpoint and restore features.

To get started, visit git.wpengine.com, and contact our support team with your SSH pub key.

On behalf of everyone at WP Engine, thank you.  

Ben Metcalfe
Co-Founder, WP Engine