Getting Started

The “website project” repository

When working with wp.com VIP, the first thing we need to create is a repository for the “website” project. From a Composer point of view, this is the root package of type project.

This repository will be:

• The central place to require all dependencies via Composer. “Dependencies”, means themes, plugins, MU plugins, libraries.
• The starting point to set up the local development environment for the website
• The gateway to deploy to the VIP GitHub repository, and thus to VIP servers.

It’s all a composer.json

All the three high-level features expected from the “website project” repository and listed above are mostly done by creating a composer.json that requires this package as a dependency.

{
    "name": "acme/my-vip-website",
    "description": "Central repository for My VIP website.",
    "license": "proprietary",
    "type": "project",
    "require": {
        "inpsyde/vip-composer-plugin": "^3",
        "acme/my-vip-theme": "^1",
        "acme/my-vip-plugin": "^1",
        "acme/my-vip-muplugin": "^1"
    },
    "autoload": {
        "exclude-from-classmap": [
            "**/vip-composer-plugin/**"
        ]
    },
    "config": {
        "vendor-dir": "vip/client-mu-plugins/vendor",
        "optimize-autoloader": true,
        "allow-plugins": {
            "composer/*": true,
            "inpsyde/*": true
        }
    }
}

Having just such a composer.json in the root of the “website project” repository, is most of the work we need to do to satisfy all our needs in the regard of the project initialization, local development, and deployment preparation.

Highlights

• Note inpsyde/vip-composer-plugin in require. That is the requirement for this package, and that’s where the “magic” resides.
• In real-world projects the list of dependencies in require will be longer, sometimes much longer, but that is business-as-usual in a Composer package. This example lists just a few example packages.
• The config.vendor-dir is a mandatory configuration for this package to work. This depends on the folder structure we need to have and because Composer only reads config of the root package we need this configuration to happen in the project repository.
• autoload.exclude-from-classmap is an optimization of autoloader. The great part of this package contains code that is only used during the “build phase” of the website, still we can’t require it as a “dev” dependency, because we also need it when building for production. By excluding this package’s classes from the optimized Composer autoloader, the impact on build website as negligible as ~200kb of text files sitting on the hard drive.

Next steps

With our base composer.json in place, we are a composer install & composer vip away from having our website project repository ready for local development as we as ready to be deployed. Learn more in the next chapter.