Notice: Scheduled Maintenance for part of the VIP Dashboard

UPDATES

We will perform maintenance on a service that powers various features for the VIP Dashboard. The maintenance window for this upgrade will begin at 9 AM UTC on 22 June 2023, and is expected to last no more than 4 hours (please see the updates on the same post)

No application downtime is expected as a result of this maintenance. Sites will continue to serve requests, and editorial and publishing activity can continue as normal.

The following services will be impacted during the maintenance window:

  • The Plugins panel: The list of plugins shown would be stale for the period of the maintenance, e.g. recently added plugins will not show, recently removed plugins will remain until maintenance is completed.
  • Network Sites panel: the list of network sites will be stale, e.g. recently added network sites will not show, recently removed network sites will remain until maintenance is completed. This will not affect you if you do not use WordPress multisite.
  • WordPress multisite network site launch tool: the tools for launching a network site will not be available during the period of maintenance. This will not affect you if you do not use WordPress multisite.
  • Media Backup export: you will be unable to restrict the files to a particular network site when generating the backup to download.This will not affect you if you do not use WordPress multisite.
  • Database Backup export: you will be unable to restrict the database tables to just those tables associated with a particular network site when generating the backup to download.This will not affect you if you do not use WordPress multisite.
  • Launch status: the launched status (typically shown at the top of the left sidebar) will not show for multisite applications.

If you have any questions, please open a support ticket and we’ll be happy to assist.

New Features: Simplified Database Export & Synchronization with Local Environment

We’re excited to release two new VIP-CLI commands that will help developers export and import a database backup into their local environment in a single step. The new commands will improve developer productivity and reduce errors coming from importing a database backup into a local development environment. This is a large improvement over the current multi-step process

New export command

We are adding the ability to export database contents of a site from VIP-CLI with a single command:

vip export sql @<your-site-id>.<environment-name> –output=<output-file>

This command automatically detects the latest backup of a site, prepares SQL export, and downloads the file as specified with the –output option. If this option is not specified, it downloads in the user’s current working directory.

$ vip export sql @0000.production --output /home/user/exported.sql.gz
Fetching the latest backup for mytestsite
✓ Latest backup found with timestamp 2023-05-30T08:16:09.000Z
Creating a new export for the backup with timestamp 2023-05-30T08:16:09.000Z
✓ Preparing 
✓ Creating backup copy 
✓ Requesting download link 
✓ Downloading file
File saved to /home/user/exported.sql.gz

Please note that this command does not let you select any specific backup, tables or network sites. We will iteratively add features to it, and for now it can only export the latest backup, all tables and all network sites.

New sync command

To try this feature, ensure that you’re on the latest version of VIP-CLI and simply run the following in your terminal:

vip dev-env sync sql --slug=<your-local-env-slug> @<your-site-id>.<environment-name>

Depending on the size of the database backup, this command may take a bit of time to finish. A successful attempt should look like the following:

$ vip dev-env sync sql --slug=0000-production @0000.production
Fetching the latest backup for mytestsite
✓ Latest backup found with timestamp 2023-05-30T12:43:07.000Z
Creating a new export for the backup with timestamp 2023-05-30T12:43:07.000Z
✓ Preparing 
✓ Creating backup copy 
✓ Requesting download link 
✓ Downloading file - 100.00% (37.01 KB/37.01 KB)
File saved to /tmp/vip-cli-YrjINx/sql-export.sql.gz
Extracting the exported file /tmp/vip-cli-YrjINx/sql-export.sql.gz...
✓ Extracted to /tmp/vip-cli-YrjINx/sql-export.sql
Extracting site urls from the SQL file...
Running the following search-replace operations on the SQL file:
  //mytestsite.go-vip.net -> //0000-production.vipdev.lndo.site
✓ Search-replace operation is complete
Importing the SQL file...
Success: The cache was flushed.
Success: Created user 3.
Success: User "vipgo" created.
✓ SQL file imported

Please note that this does not yet have full parity with the feature on the VIP Dashboard. We currently support only importing the latest backup of the entire database, and only single site installations.

To use this feature, please run npm install -g @automattic/vip to get the latest version of VIP-CLI. Please also verify that your VIP-CLI installation is on version 2.30.0 or above, by running vip --version from the terminal.

We would love to know what you think. How do you hope to use these new tools? What could be added to improve your experience? Feel free to get in touch!