Deploying Trellis to DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider that offers virtual servers (droplets) 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 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Creating a new server #

Trellis CLI comes with a trellis server create command to automatically create and provision a server for a specified environment:

$ trellis server create production

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

DigitalOcean is the default provider. You can also set it explicitly with the --provider flag or in your trellis.cli.yml:

server:
  provider: digitalocean

Quick start (region and size will be prompted) #

$ trellis server create production

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

Additional options #

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

$ trellis server create --help

Usage: trellis server create [options] ENVIRONMENT

Creates a server on a cloud provider for the environment specified.

Only remote servers (for staging and production) are currently supported.

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 server create production

Create a 1gb server in the nyc3 region:

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

Create a server but skip provisioning:

  $ trellis server create --skip-provision production

Arguments:
  ENVIRONMENT Name of environment (ie: production)

Options:
      --provider        Cloud provider (digitalocean, hetzner)
      --region          Region to create the server in
      --image           (default: ubuntu-24-04-x64) Server image (ie: Linux distribution)
      --size            Server size/type
      --skip-provision  Skip provision after server is created
      --ssh-key         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 server, 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 #

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.

Performance #

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

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