Deploying Trellis to DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider that offers virtual servers called droplets starting at $5/month that can handle most normal WordPress sites when provisioned with Trellis.

To provision a server, Trellis requires a server running a bare/stock version of the latest Ubuntu LTS release.

# Creating a new DigitalOcean droplet

Trellis CLI comes with a trellis droplet create command to automatically create a DigitalOcean droplet for a specified environment:

$ trellis droplet create production

If the DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable is not set, the command will prompt for one.

# Quick start (region and size will be prompted)

$ trellis droplet create production

The remote server playbook will run and provision your droplet with PHP, Nginx, and everything else included in Trellis.

# Additional options

The command help file can be accessed by passing the --help flag:

$ trellis droplet create --help

Usage: trellis droplet create [options] ENVIRONMENT

Creates a droplet (server) on DigitalOcean for the environment specified.

Only remote servers (for staging and production) are currently supported.
Development should be managed separately through Vagrant.

This command requires a DigitalOcean personal access token.
Link: https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/api/tokens/new

If the DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable is not set, the command
will prompt for one.

Create a production server (region and size will be prompted):

  $ trellis droplet create production

Create a 1gb server in the nyc3 region:

  $ trellis droplet create --region=nyc3 --size=s-1vcpu-1gb production

Create a 1gb server with a specific Ubuntu image:

  $ trellis droplet create --region=nyc3 --image=ubuntu-18-04-x64 --size=s-1vcpu-1gb production

Create a server but skip provisioning:

  $ trellis droplet create --skip-provision production

Arguments:
  ENVIRONMENT Name of environment (ie: production)

Options:
      --region          Region to create the server in
      --image           (default: ubuntu-20-04-x64) Server image (ie: Linux distribution)
      --size            Server size/type
      --skip-provision  Skip provision after server is created
      --ssh-key         (default: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) path to SSH public key to be added on the server
  -h, --help            show this help

# Changes made after running the command

After creating a new droplet, your local project will have a modified hosts file for the environment that you provisioned:

[production]
-your_server_hostname
+159.89.191.207

[web]
-your_server_hostname
+159.89.191.207

# Deploying to DigitalOcean droplet

Once your server is provisioned you’ll want to perform the first deploy. If you try to visit your site before deploying you’ll see a server 500 error.

$ trellis deploy production

After the first deploy is done, you can now either install WordPress by visiting the site or even import an existing database.

# $5 droplet performance

If you enable the FastCGI caching in Trellis then you’ll be able to squeeze quite a bit of performance out of a $5 DigitalOcean droplet.

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