As of today, VIP Quickstart is officially deprecated as a development environment for WordPress.com. With Quickstart’s version of Ubuntu (12.04) approaching end-of-life, we’re switching local development for WordPress.com VIP to more closely match our approach on VIP Go.
Going forward, we recommend using Chassis or VVV, with WordPress.com VIP mu-plugins and some extra development plugins. Both of the recommended environments are widely used in the WordPress community and we think the experience is better than we could offer with VIP Quickstart. (You’re also welcome to use a WordPress setup of your choice.)
We have a new documentation page that covers how to set up a development environment for your WordPress.com VIP project.
We no longer recommend setting up new Quickstart environments, though we will continue to provide support through to April 21, 2017.
As always, please reach out if you have any questions or run into issues.
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For a non-Vagrant option, Laravel Valet is pretty much the best thing ever.
@Joshn Interesting you have any reason why you guys didn’t choose docker?
The existing projects we mentioned are widely used in the WordPress world with active development, so we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel again.
FYI, we’re investigating adding Docker support to Chassis: https://github.com/Chassis/Chassis/pull/272
Both Chassis and VVV are mainly about installing and setting up all the pieces needed to run a site, and are mostly agnostic as to how you do that. Whether that’s inside a VM or inside a container doesn’t matter much, the real complexity is in all the pieces built on top of that.
One of the benefits of Quickstart was the relative ease of getting it set up on EC2 for a public staging site. What about providing non-production VIP Go environments to serve as public staging for sites hosted on WordPress.com cloud hosting? You could provide an upstream Git repo that is configured according to your dev-environment docs which we could then clone as the basis for staging sites.
One thing we’re planning in the future for Chassis is better support for “production” (non-local) environments: https://github.com/Chassis/Chassis/issues/123
Right now, it’s possible, but a bit of a pain due to some assumptions made throughout the codebase. We’re working on removing those assumptions, with the plan of eventually having a production.pp manifest.
I’m with Weston here. Spinning up a new EC2 server for staging and shared remote dev work is common for us. Of course we usually just clone an existing image and update.
There are currently no plans to offer WordPress.com staging environments via VIP Go. The two environments are different enough that it wouldn’t be a great indicator of how things would work in production.
What are the risks of continued use of Quick start environments after the deprecation? is there a process for converting a (non-local) Quickstart server to one that can remain up to date with the mu plugins?
Ubuntu will no longer receive critical security upgrades. Meanwhile, newer versions of Ubuntu will keep receiving updates — presumably security issues can be inferred from the updates to newer versions. There is not process to convert a Quickstart server over to the newer setup with mu-plugins.
> When an Ubuntu release reaches its “end of life” it receives no further maintenance updates, including critical security upgrades. We highly recommend that you upgrade to a recent version of Ubuntu at this point.
https://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life
Sorry if I missed this in the environment docs or the post, but do you guys recommend a specific version of Ubuntu (assuming it’s still Ubuntu) to match the VIP prod environment?
It looks like VVV (https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV/blob/develop/Vagrantfile) is using trusty64/14.04 while it looks like Chassis (https://github.com/Chassis/Chassis/blob/master/Vagrantfile) is on precise64.
Our team is using a custom setup (provisioning via Ansible), so any help here would be much appreciated. Thanks!
We actually use various versions of Debian in production. Ubuntu tends to be more widely used by Vagrant boxes, which is why we used it in the past. I’ll get the docs updated to reflect the current Debian version.