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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