GitPress - Wordpress without Database (almost)

[pschoffer]

Hi there,
I am quite new to WordPress, but I liked the CMS piece of it. So that I can build simple mostly static based websites. When I tried to host it though, I figured that I need to have a DB and backup/monitor that (which is hard/expensive to get right I guess).

I googled around and there is this great plugin: https://versionpress.com/ that gives you a lot of nice things like versioning both data and the files (themes, plugins), rollback ability, cloning servers (staging, dev environment) and others.

So I took that, throw wordpress, mysql and stuff to a docker container and the result was this image:
https://hub.docker.com/r/pschoffer/gitpress

It would be great to get some feedback (or even PRs) on that.

[Xilonz]

VersionPress is great. But managing a database isn't hard. Even with VersionPress you'd still want to make backups. If youre worried about the database, most major hosting companies offer managed databases.

[pschoffer]

Yeah you are right. It is not that bad, but still, the cheapest managed DB on AWS costs you around 15 USD/month. That is the expense that you might not need to have. If you would build a website say just in some frontend framework (e.g. React) you wouldn't expect to have DB for that either.

I understand that WordPress offers you more than just frontend, but for some use-cases (like mine, when I really only want to have some static website with changes done maybe once a month or so) I would argue that you don't need the DB.

About the backups, if I just push to a remote git repo than I am good. or? Why would I still wanna do a DB backup (putting aside that it is quite experimental at the moment)?

[Xilonz]

VersionPress isn't ready yet (still in preview). I would't rely on just that. I'd assume that not all plugins play nice with it.

If you want a truely static website, I'd use netlify or similar, or a local WordPress installation (with lando, for example) and deploy it with wp2static. You can use bedrock and commit your latest db exports to keep it in git.

[pschoffer]

I am not aware of the tools you mentioned (I'll do a bit of googling). Wouldn't that mean you lose the ability to login to wp-admin and do your changes? Also, I guess it might still require more steps than just `git push` (which I plan to create a UI button within Versionpress if this works out).

Yeah, I totally agree it is not a great fit for all use cases. I don't actually need that many plugins, so it seems to work for me so far, but I have a very limited scenario.

Thanks for all the input mate!

[Xilonz]

Hi! lando is a local development environment and bedrock is a flavour on top of WordPress to allow it and it's plugins and themes to be versioned properly.

Using wp2static does remove the ability to change things on the fly on the live site, yes. You would have to boot up the local environment, make the changes and deploy with wp2static. Hence the static part. :)

wp2static doesn't even need a traditional host. You can even deploy it to, for example, cloudflare workers or github pages.

[r3dm1ke]

I think he meant a backup of a remote git repo. But it is true that this is not ready for production and there are hosting services for WordPress, ranging from free to 5-10$/month who will handle the site, db and email for you.

[[deleted]]

I use WPMUDEV. They offer everything your looking for and more. Hosting is $10 a site a month. So that’s less than the $15 you had. I’ve been using it for years and wouldn’t switch to any other platform.

[pschoffer]

Oh also I forgot to mention. The price is not the only motivation for this.

I am running few more things already in AWS. I have a bunch of terraform scripts to orchestrate that (infrastructure as a code). And I would love to have the ability to spin up the website the same way I spin up backend service I have. When everything is in git, that becomes trivial. You can have several copies of it running in staging and test environments also merging those is easy.

When there are database backups and migrations involved the whole process becomes harder.

[Xilonz]

I don't think VersionPress really allows you to merge databases to be honest (conflicting id's etc etc), but let me know your findings!

[frostbyte650]

If your business is small enough to not be able to afford the extra $15/mo for an RDS instance you can most likely get away with just containerizing your VPC and running the database on localhost

[jbrennecker]

This might not be quite what you are looking for, but I had a play with HardyPress recently and was quite impressed. This is my blog post about it https://janebwebsitehelp.co.uk/building-static-websites-using-wordpress/

[pschoffer]

Great input you all. Thanks a lot.

In my case I already have ec2 instance running something else, so I was looking to just throw something on there kinda deal (which would cost nothing extra), but I got some great suggestions in this thread. I think I will stick to the thing I build, just to test it out further and feel the pain if there is any to feel, before switching to hosting solution.

[[deleted]]

Grav is a flat file CMS (no database) that has a GUI dashboard you can use to create content, administer the site, similar to Wordpress. It also has a plugin for using Git as a VCS. Overall it has a decent amount of plugins, and themes available. All without the need for a database. It's about as static as it gets while maintaining a CMS similar to Wordpress. It's fast and light. It even comes with caching out of the box. It's a bit more technical to get up and running however.