FAQ's  →  Trellis

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What’s so special about Trellis?

Trellis offers powerful advantages over any other WordPress development environment at a cost you just can’t beat.

Advantages:

  1. Run on a modern LEMP stack (instead of LAMP): Linux (Ubuntu), Nginx (instead of Apache), MariaDB (instead of MySQL), and PHP
  2. Develop with environmental parity: Development config = Staging config = Production config, etc, while also allowing for thoughtful exceptions and differences where you actually want and need them (like creating a remote development server that allows live admin code edits, even though your other remotes disallow this)
  3. Develop on a Vagrant VM (which, again, is automatically configured to mimic Production as closely as possible)
  4. Develop on WordPress or WordPress MultiSite
  5. Develop with MailHog (enabled automatically) for locally captured email
  6. Debug with Xdebug (configured and ready for use in Development, and available via remote SSH tunnel for remotes like Production and Staging)
  7. Access all environments (local and remote) with SSH
  8. Deploy atomically to any remote (Production, Staging, etc)
  9. Manage configuration with Ansible (including passwords encryption with Ansible Vault)
  10. Manage dependencies with Composer
  11. Manage code with Git (BitBucket, GitHub, etc)
  12. Manage WordPress with WP-CLI
  13. Manage email generated at remotes (Production, Staging, etc) with built-in config that supports many common SMTP service providers
  14. Enable bundled options like microcaching or any of three different types of SSL (LE, Manual, and Self Signed)
  15. Extend as needed with Nginx Includes, user contributed Ansible roles and playbooks, or your own custom Ansible roles and playbooks

Cost: $0.00

To be clear and fair, I should point out that many of these capabilities can also be found in many of the smarter DIY stacks discussed throughout the WordPress Geekdom, but these will typically not be backed up by top shelf community and support or a deep commitment to ongoing refinement.

There is, of course, one potential gotcha. Trellis is not for beginners. The Roots team is very upfront about the fact that they have created a professional toolset, rather than a polished plug-and-play solution that “just works”. Using Trellis requires a little skill, and the willingness to develop a little more. Specifically, you need to be ready to get your hands dirty with Ansible, Nginx, and the other components that comprise Trellis and the stack it drives.

So, if you’ve tried the rest, and you’re willing to invest in the best, hop over to roots.io and dig in.