Tag: wordpress

Optimizing WordPress Performance with AWS, Docker and Jenkins

At Jijutm.com, I wanted to deliver a fast and reliable experience for our readers. To achieve this, I have implemented a containerized approach using Docker and Jenkins for managing this WordPress site. This article delves into the details of our setup and how it contributes to exceptional website performance.

Why Containers?

Traditional server management often involves installing software directly on the operating system. This can lead to dependency conflicts, versioning issues, and a complex environment. Docker containers provide a solution by encapsulating applications with all their dependencies into isolated units. This offers several advantages:

Consistency: Docker ensures a consistent environment regardless of the underlying operating system. This simplifies development, testing, and deployment.
Isolation: Applications running in containers are isolated from each other, preventing conflicts and improving security.
Portability: Docker containers are portable across different environments, making it easy to migrate your application between development, staging, and production.

The Containerized Architecture

This WordPress site leverages three Docker containers:

  1. Nginx: A high-performance web server that serves the content of this website efficiently.
  2. PHP-FPM: A FastCGI process manager that executes PHP code for dynamic content generation in WordPress.
  3. MariaDB: A robust and popular open-source relational database management system that stores the WordPress data and is fully compatible with MySQL.

These containers work together seamlessly to deliver a smooth user experience. Nginx acts as the front door, handling user requests and routing them to the PHP-FPM container for processing. PHP-FPM interacts with the MariaDB container to retrieve and update website data.

Leveraging Jenkins for Automation

While Docker simplifies application management, automating deployments is crucial for efficient workflow. This is where Jenkins comes in. Jenkins is an open-source automation server that we use to manage the build and deployment process for our WordPress site.

Here’s how Jenkins integrates into this workflow:

  1. Code Changes: Whenever we make changes to the WordPress codebase, we push them to a version control system like Git.
  2. Jenkins Trigger: The push to the Git repository triggers a job in Jenkins.
  3. Build Stage: Jenkins pulls the latest code, builds a new Docker image containing the updated WordPress application, and pushes it to a Docker registry.
  4. Deployment Stage: The new Docker image is deployed to our hosting environment, updating the running containers with the latest code.

This automation ensures that our website stays up-to-date with the latest changes without any manual intervention.

Hooked into WordPress Post or Page Publish.

Over and above maintaining the code using Jenkins, each content Publish action triggers another Jenkins project, which runs a sequence of commands. wget in mirror mode to convert the whole site to static HTML files. sed to rewrite the URLs from local host to realtime external domain specific. gzip to create .html.gz for each HTML files. aws cli to sync the static mirror folder with that in AWS S3 and finally apply meta headers to the files to specify the content type and content-encoding. When all the files are synced, the AWS CLI issues an invalidate request to the CloudFront distribution.

Benefits of this Approach

Improved Performance: Docker containers provide a lightweight and efficient environment, leading to faster loading times for this website.
Enhanced Scalability: I don’t need to bother about scaling this application by adding more containers to handle increased traffic, as that is handled by aws S3 and CloudFront.
Simplified Management: Docker and Jenkins automate a significant portion of the infrastructure management, freeing up time for development and content creation. With the docker and all components running in my Asus TUF A17 Laptop powered by XUbuntu the hosting charges are limited to AWS Route53, AWS S3 and AWS CloudFront only.
Reliable Deployments: Jenkins ensures consistent and reliable deployments, minimizing the risk of errors or downtime.
Well for minimal dynamic content like the download counters, AWS Serverless lambda functions are written and deployed for updating download requests into aDynamoDB table and to display the count near any downloadable content with proper markup. Along with this the comments are moved into Disqus, as it is a comment system that can be used on WordPress sites. It can replace the native WordPress comments system.

Conclusion

By leveraging Docker containers and Jenkins, I have established a robust and performant foundation for this site. This approach allows me to focus on delivering high-quality content to the readers while ensuring a smooth and fast user experience.

Additional Considerations

Security: While Docker containers enhance security, it’s essential to maintain secure practices like keeping Docker containers updated and following security best practices for each service.
Monitoring: Monitoring the health and performance of your containers is crucial. Tools like Docker Stats and Prometheus can provide valuable insights.

Hope this article provides a valuable perspective on how Docker and Jenkins can be used to optimize a WordPress website. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!

Leveraging WordPress and AWS S3 for a Robust and Scalable Website

Introduction

In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for businesses of all sizes. WordPress, a versatile content management system (CMS), and Amazon S3, a scalable object storage service, offer a powerful combination for building and hosting dynamic websites.

Understanding the Setup

To effectively utilize WordPress and S3, here’s a breakdown of the key components and their roles:

  1. WordPress:
  • Content Management: WordPress provides an intuitive interface for creating and managing website content.
  • Plugin Ecosystem: A vast array of plugins extends WordPress’s functionality, allowing you to add features like SEO, e-commerce, and security.
  • Theme Customization: You can customize the appearance of your website using themes, either by choosing from a wide range of pre-built themes or creating your own. Get it free from the maintainers directly and free: https://wordpress.org/download/
  1. AWS S3:
  • Scalable Storage: S3 offers virtually unlimited storage capacity to accommodate your website’s growing content.
  • High Availability: S3 ensures your website is always accessible by distributing data across multiple servers.
  • Fast Content Delivery: Leveraging AWS CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN), can significantly improve website performance by caching static assets closer to your users.

The Deployment Process

Here’s a simplified overview of the deployment process:

  1. Local Development:
  • Set up a local WordPress development environment using tools like XAMPP, MAMP, or Docker.
  • Create and test your website locally.
  1. Static Site Generation:
  • Use a tool like WP-CLI or a plugin to generate static HTML files from your WordPress site.
  • This process converts dynamic content into static files, which can be optimized for faster loading times.
  1. S3 Deployment:
  • Upload the generated static files to an S3 bucket.
  • Configure S3 to serve the files directly or through a CloudFront distribution.
  1. CloudFront Distribution:
  • Set up a CloudFront distribution to cache your static assets and deliver them to users from edge locations.
  • Configure custom domain names and SSL certificates for your website.

Benefits of Using WordPress and S3

  • Scalability: Easily handle increased traffic and content without compromising performance.
  • Cost-Effective: S3 offers affordable storage and bandwidth options.
  • High Availability: Ensure your website is always accessible to users.
  • Security: Benefit from AWS’s robust security measures.
  • Flexibility: Customize your website to meet your specific needs.
  • Performance: Optimize your website’s performance with caching and CDN.

Conclusion

By combining the power of WordPress and AWS S3, you can create a robust, scalable, and high-performance website. This setup offers a solid foundation for your online presence, whether you are a small business owner or a large enterprise.

Start your cloud journey for free today with AWS! Sign up now: https://aws.amazon.com/free/

bz2url – a very simple url compressor for wordpress

Its been over a year since we started bz2.in url compression for inhouse projects at Saturn and is being in use for Asianet India and this blog. Recently for a new project we absolutely needed an integrated url shortner, which finally gave shape to the initial version.
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WordPress – preview and modify a theme till we are satisfied

Since we at Saturn provide wordpress as a CMS, and have more than a handful of experienced WordPress customizers, and themeres we have handled several challeges related to WordPress. The latest one being that the client was offered a facelift, and they wanted to preview the progress of integration. I searched the plugin repositories and blogs, found a lot of solutions, which include theme switchers, theme preview, and even suggestions to have a local copy. Well with our client, we could not think of a local copy, since the database dump itself was about 320GB and the images and videows was a whopping 1200 GB. Well after reading through the source of get_option, a wave struck me.



function new_theme_preview(){
    if(isset($_COOKIE['ShowNewTheme'])){
        return 'myNewTheme';
    }
    return false;
}
 
add_filter('pre_option_current_theme', 'new_theme_preview', 1, 0);
 


I added the above to the end of an active plugin, then created two files newtheme.php and oldtheme.php, containing code to set and remove the cookie. The files were put into the top level folder. Once I am done with the theming, I could remove all these manually.

// newtheme.php
setcookie ( 'ShowNewTheme', '1');
header("Location: ./");
 
//oldtheme.php
setcookie ( 'ShowNewTheme', false);
header("Location: ./");
 

Posting to wordpress using php cli and xmlrpc

A reader once asked me if I could build a command line tool which takes title from one file, and content from another file to create wordpress post. I tried, which finally gave an outline to this script. I dont think that this is very high fly, but for those whom the xmlrpc is mumbo, this might be somthing worth looking into.
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Automatic image sizing with static delivery – WordPress Enhancement

Recently I got fed up trying to convince the operators of a client, for whom we had implemented a wordpress site. The operators, even after we repeatedly asked to upload only relevant sizes for certian positions, were trying to make one size fit for all. Hell, places where thumbnails of 1 to 2K would suffice, were being used up by 30K images, resized by our theme constraints. We were running wordpress on lighttpd.
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JSON feed for WordPress

Pretty simple, really. Adds a new type of feed you can subscribe to. Simply add ?feed=json to anywhere you get a normal feed to get it in JSON form (but with a cutdown version of events).

Version 1.1 added support for JSONP. To get a JSONP response instead of a normal JSON structure, simply add jsonp=callbackName to your query, where callbackName is the name of the function to be wrapped with.

Author: Chris Northwood
Download: WordPress Plugin Repository

Speeding up WordPress home page

After about an year, since we launched Asianet News Portal the home page with all the complications had started to show a dead slow performance, and by using our Query Profiler, I could identify the bottleneck as the number of queries, and wordpress itself was telling the status as 48 queries in 6.344  seconds. Now this was a whopping value, and when the latency of 2 to 3 seconds is added to this, the initial html load would be in 9 seconds. Making the total site complete load in about 53 seconds. One can imagine the agony I was feeling, after all the work I had done to get backlinks, and if users who are visiting the site is just running away without waiting for the site to load, then I better not run the site atall.
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Fun digging into WordPress XML RPC

Once we achieved 20K visits per day at asianetindia.com (maintained by Saturn SPL), we planned to hammer in and our target was 30k in three months. We have achived that view the stats. For this twitter and blog helped a lot. We had added auto blogging, and wordtwit both to the existing asianetindia.com. It means each post when published will be tweeted, as well as a post to blog, which contains the excerpt with a back link to the original.

We wanted to get maximum links back into the blog also, and thought that a track back would be the best method and choose that against auto commenting systems. And a full time tester was doing linking related news and posts from other sites to our blog posts. It started to turn tiring when thought of the volume that was getting posted in a day. At this point, we at saturn started to think of automating the linking drive. The out come is autolinker, which is run using the random cron.
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Using TagTheNet to generate tags on WordPress

Recently on Kerala News by Asianet, though the wp-simple-tags was there, the posts were not being tagged automatically. And on a detailed check I found it was due to a misconfiguration, and once the same was done properly the tagging started smoothly. But already a set of 8K posts were there with no or unrelated tags mistakes and un awareness of the operators who were posting to the site. Now I wanted these to be tagged properly.
I had already used the word-twit plugin and done some mods to the same, so it was more eaiser for me. Just went through the original code of word-twit and salvaged a small script which is attached here with as download.
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );
The code above loads the wordpress system and initializes the wp variables and connects to the database.
global $wpdb;
Makesure we have the database abstraction object from wordpress, to select the posts, and do all the required manipulations on the same.
require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php' );
Include the inbuilt snoopy class, to mimic a web browser with the most simplicity.
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