Deploying to WPEngine with DeployHQ

Deploying to your Wordpress site hosted on WPEngine is very simple with DeployHQ.

Firstly, you'll need to set up your DeployHQ project, then connect to your WPEngine server.

Setting up your project

Head to the Projects screen in DeployHQ, then click the New Project button to get started.

You'll be prompted to enter a name for your project, then select where your repository is hosted.

Next, click Create project and you'll be taken to a screen where you can log in with your repository hosting account to authorise access and then choose your repository.

• Adding a Bitbucket repository
• Adding a Codebase repository
• Adding a GitHub repository
• Adding a GitLab repository
• Adding a repository manually

Setting up WPEngine

Once you've configured your repository, you'll need to connect to your WPEngine server.

To be able to do this, you'll need to create an SFTP user in WPEngine to be able to access and upload files to the server.

You can follow step one and step two in WPEngine's own guide to do so. In the interests of security, it's recommended you just create a user that has access only to the directory your deploying to.

Creating an SFTP user in WPEngine

Once you've created your user and located the SFTP credentials, you can add them to your DeployHQ project.

Head to Servers & Groups, and click the New Server button at the top of the screen. If you've just added your repository, you will have been taken to this page automatically.

Start by entering a name, and choosing SSH/SFTP as the protocol:

Next, enter the hostname and port, followed by the username and password for the new user:

Then, optionally you can enter a deployment path (where you want files to be placed on the server). In the case of a Wordpress deployment, you might just deploy your theme files to wp-content/themes/mytheme.

You'll then be able to configure some useful Deployment options, including the ability to automatically deploy to the server on push to your repository, and to only deploy files from a specific directory in your repository:

Again, if you're just deploying a theme but have your whole Wordpress instance committed to Git, you would just enter wp-content/themes/mytheme as the deployment subdirectory. Otherwise, if you want to just deploy your whole repo, or if you just have the theme committed, leave that setting blank.

Click Create Server to finish, then you can proceed to start your first deployment.

Run your first deployment

By default, DeployHQ will upload the whole repository to your server on the first deployment, because there is no previously deployed commit to compare to.

If your files are already on WPEngine though and up to date with the latest commit, you can follow this guide to skip that first deployment:

• Don't deploy your whole repository on the first deployment

Otherwise, just follow this guide to start your first deployment, then after the first deployment, only files that have changed will be uploaded in future.

• Running your first deployment

That's it! You've now set up and run your first deployment to your WPEngine server and your future changes will be uploaded for you automatically, or at the simple click of a button.

Further reading

DeployHQ has a number of very useful features to help with your Wordpress deployments in general that you might wish to find out more about:

• Compiling assets and javascript with the Build pipeline
• Running commands on your server with SSH commands
• Stop certain files from being uploaded in deployments using Excluded files
• Keep important files safely away from your repository using Config files
• Keep your team in the loop and run other useful tasks during a deployment with our Integrations