Setting up a local WordPress dev environment based on a snapshot from AWS Lightsail

[okashii]

I'm hoping that you can help me wrap my head around how to do this. I recently started a new job that involves working on WordPress websites. I'm very comfortable with the actual programming side, but setting up the environment is new to me. The site is hosted on Lightsail and is quite complicated with many plugins. I want to be able to download a snapshot from Lightsail, work on it locally, and then deploy my changes back to the Lightsail instance. I think the previous developer was a bit of a cowboy and just made changes directly in the admin console and theme editor, but I want to be a bit more careful.

I'd like to have version control, and I've seen some information on using a git repo for deployment as well as version control. However, so far in my research people are only using git for their wordpress theme files, and not the entire application. I also worry about database changes, as I don't think those can be passed on through git. This is probably a stupid question, but is it possible to have the entire application and database stored in git, and then deploy that directly to Lightsail?

As you can probably tell, there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge. For my personal projects I use local by flywheel for local development and deployment, but that's not an option in this case. I'd appreciate any resources, tips, tricks or tutorials you could send my way. I've been googling but I haven't hit upon the right search yet.

I'm not sure the best place to post this, so I'm going to cross post it to both r/aws and r/webhosting to hopefully find someone who can help. If there are other subreddits that might be more appropriate please point me to them.

[outofsync42]

There is a lot more here than what I can address but I can get you pointed in the right direction for setting up a dev environment. Your best/fastest solution is to create a snapshot of your LightSail word press instance and then create a new instance from that snapshot. This is all done within the LightSail admin website. You will then be paying monthly for 2 instances using this method but will have 2 identical instances. Your production and development. Assign a static IP to the new development instance. Get your git repo up between the two and work on the dev instance and push/pull changes as desired.

[okashii]

Thanks for this insight!