A tour of Sprout

Take a quick tour of the basic workflow with Sprout. We’ll create a new repo and project, push a snapshot of your database and content, and then seed from your newly created snapshot.

You’ll need a working WordPress project and wp-cli installed to follow this guide.

Sprout is still pre-release!

Make sure you’ve backed up your uploads and database before starting, just in case you run into any problems.

1. Set up a new Sprout repository

When using Sprout for the first time, you’ll need to set up a repository. This is a location that will store all of your data. You’ll usually want this to be some network storage of some kind (think S3?), but for the purposes of this demo, we will use a local directory.

Let’s create a repo definition:

sprout repo new my-repo

Sprout will fire up a text editor, and let you customise the repo definiton. You can leave access_key blank (it’ll be generated for you if so), but make sure to set repository to a new local directory. How about /tmp/my-repo?

Save and quit the editor.

Next, we will initialise the repo. If you were connecting to an existing Sprout repo, you could skip this next step.

sprout repo init my-repo

Sprout will generate an access key for you - this is the encryption key for your data. If you lose it, you lose your data. It will be stored in the repo definition file though, so don’t worry about having it to hand all of the time.

2. Initialise your WordPress project

To create a sprout.yaml file, which will identify which exact version of database and uploads content should be used when seeding, make sure you’re in an existing WordPress project and simply run:

sprout init

Sprout will open another editor, and let you customise the project name and other settings. The defaults should be fine (and Sprout will detect if you’ve moved your wp-uploads folder, like Bedrock or Radicle does).

Close and save the editor. You can commit your new sprout.yaml to your git repo if you’d like.

3. Take a snapshot

Still inside the WordPress project, run

sprout snap

Sprout will then snapshot your database and entire wp-content folder and push it to the repo you just set up. It’s that simple.

Your sprout.yaml file will have been updated with the latest snapshot ID. If you commit and push this to git, other developers can easily seed from the snapshot you just took.

4. Seed the project

Let’s pointlessly seed the project we’ve just snapshotted. Just run:

sprout seed

Sprout will first stash all of your database and wp-uploads content locally (to avoid any lost data), and then will restore from the snapshot that’s described by your sprout.yaml.