GitHub Open Source Friday, 12 Apr 2021

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From YouTube: Working with WordPress and GitHub Actions - Open Source Friday

Description

Helen Hou-Sandi is the Director of Open Source Initiatives at 10up and Core Developer at WordPress. Helen joins @bdougie to share how GitHub Actions has helped with common needs for WordPress development.

https://github.com/helen
https://github.com/10up/actions-wordpress

0:00 - Intro
1:24 - How did Helen start doing Open Source
8:14 - GitHub Actions in Worpress Demo
10:55 - Example Workflow files
19:13 - How does WordPress manage their open source projects
28:28 - GitHub Actions to manage your WordPress plugin deploys and documentation

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A

What's up y'all, it's b duggy from github and I've got another open source friday for you. Now these videos are a way for you to learn about open source projects and the folks that contribute to them. And today we have helen lee developer from wordpress uh who's, going to be focusing on how she's leveraging github actions to improve her developer workflow for herself, as well as for the contributors to wordpress and wordpress plugins.

A

So I hope you enjoy uh if you haven't done already like and subscribe and be sure to save the open source friday playlist, if you're interested in keeping up to date on how to contribute to open source and how other folks are doing it as well so enjoy.

B

Yeah hi everybody, I'm helen good to be here- do.

A

You want to briefly talk about your background, how you got the programming and then how you got to wordpress as well.

B

Sure yeah, this is the part that people always really like, I feel like um so I actually my background's in music um to have my undergrad and my master's degrees in music and I've actually like I've, given talks with like self-promotion, I guess but I've given talks about the skills that I learned as a musician and how they translated to being a really good. Well, hopefully, a really good, open source software developer and programmer.

B

um So what ended up happening? I mean I feel, like it's important for people to hear this stuff. So when I finished grad school it was like. uh I don't know what to do with myself and I need like a paycheck and health insurance. You know, and so they were hiring a web developer at the music conservatory that I had gone to, um and so I applied and uh like I've had some.

B

You know background tinkering with web stuff and programming, um but you know really was just like a trained musician, but they hired me uh figuring. You know the stuff I knew about the school uh gave me a serious advantage because you can learn programming and pick it up. I started this project migrating us to wordpress because we had, like you know, budget stuff. This was like 2008 right, so everybody had like budget problems, it's a recession, and so we were having some budget stuff and you know around software and whatever, and so we were like.

B

Oh yeah like wordpress, makes sense and there's this like multi-site thing where every like department or office could have its own little like piece of the site and like manage their own stuff and we don't have to buy them like adobe licenses and whatever. So I started developing stuff on wordpress um and then went to a word camp where I met a ton of really cool wordpress people and was like. Oh, this is like an open source thing where I could contribute myself. What does that mean? You know?

B

um And then I don't know several months later, like made my first patch for wordpress because of a missing or like a miscolored border, I think and uh and it was merged- and I was like- oh that's, that's pretty cool subversion is kind of weird, but it's pretty cool, uh so so yeah and then just kind of got sucked into it and started working as like a full-time, wordpress developer at an agency which is where I still am now uh it's been almost 10 years and yeah. It's.

A

Just been a ride, it sounds like you learned a lot of this on the job as like part of a need. Yeah.

B

Absolutely yeah, that's, I think, that's the really cool thing about like web development. um So just just for, like full transparency, I did take like computer science in high school. Like a you, know, ap computer science, and that was c plus based, um and then I did one semester as a music and computer science double major and hated computer science, but I did have one semester in java, uh but I did so.

B

I do have some like very basic underpinnings of, like you know, programming logic and that kind of stuff, um but that's what's so cool about the web. I feel like is that you know you start out when you start out with learning stuff like c plus plus and java everything's compiled right, and so it's just this like huge rant to like something that looks and feels interesting right, but on the web I mean you can have a website up and running like immediately right and like we're, like I'm from the geocities era.

B

So for me that that idea of that instant gratification, kind of like and especially something like php, where it just like, runs, there's no build. There's nothing. It's just you edit, the php and it's there yeah.

A

It's uh working with wordpress still in that same vein, where you could just edit php files and it sort of works.

B

Yeah for for a lot of use cases yeah, it's still just yeah php, so.

A

Excellent and uh zak katz mentioned in the chat uh svn still remains weird. Yes, that might be a good segue into uh the actions that I wrote. I guess yeah. I would love to talk.

B

About that, but.

A

There's also a question about your shirt too as well. If folks are asking oh.

B

Yeah yeah yeah, so my shirt says it's an honor just to be asian. This is the sandra o quote: there's also a canadian version, because she's canadian, where it has like honor with the extra you in it but yeah that's. This is my. This is my shirt, so um this is important to me.

A

Excellent well.

B

A

For wearing it, thanks for sharing and thanks for the question in the chat too as well folks but yeah, I we we got connected through the get up action. So did you want to share and uh what you've been working on.

B

Also for background for the chat I live in uh san jose costa rica, so sometimes my uh my lag can get a little bit bad just because of like physical location, so github actions for wordpress.

B

So um when, when actions came out as like, I think when it was like a closed beta phase um like I, I try to keep on top of like things that are coming um and, like you know what are some interesting things that we can do, and that's really like my job as director of open source initiatives is to keep an eye out for those sort of like opportunities to you know better the open source community to push ourselves forward like both as a company and the broader wordpress community right in our relationship to like what is open source.

B

What does it mean, and so, when I saw the action stuff coming, there were two things going on. One was that like. Hopefully, this is a controversial to say, but at the time I think this was right around the time the travis sale to like private equity was announced. It wasn't right before yeah when the travis thing hit. It was like, oh like we need to think about like what, if something happens here right and like we need to make moves somewhere else, and then also.

B

This is just something that could solve a lot of problems right. So so, on the wordpress side, I thought you know the number one pain point that I hear from the broader ecosystem right so, like I work on the core software, there's like the whole movement to like contribute to wordpress and all of that, but I think the the broader ecosystem of wordpress, both commercial and free, is really where the power of wordpress is right, and so one of the biggest places that is is with plug-in developers um and a lot.

B

And when I say a lot, I mean like 50, 60 000, free plug-ins in the central wordpress.org plug-in repository, and these are people volunteering their time right in their energy to to make that happen, and so one of the things you hear a lot is that it's really hard to remember how to do stuff in subversion.

B

um So, like especially now so like 10 years ago, more of us were using subversion across different projects or whatever. But today it's like, I would say it's super uncommon, to see subversion.

B

I would say the vast majority of time, uh with version control, you're going to see git these days and then you'll see still, I see some mercurial hanging around here and there, but, like you, just don't see subversion in use anywhere, um and so when you're not using it on a regular basis. It's really hard to remember like what are these commands that I have to run.

B

What folder do I operate out of like how does this work right, and so I thought you know a really cool thing would be to take um where people are now. So a lot of people are developing their stuff on github, right running their process, doing the code, all of that right there on github.

B

So why not bridge between github and the subversion repository right so like wordpress.org, does need to remain the source of truth right because we're not serving downloads directly from like an external source, um but we could bridge it right, and so my thought was: okay, I'm pretty good at writing.

B

You know half fake bash scripts that get the stuff done. So why not? Why not do that here? um And so that's what I did. I wrote like a little bash script, so I have this. um This is like an umbrella repo um at ted up, slash actions dash wordpress. um So this is an umbrella. It does have these directories that have the original actions on them. You can see, they haven't been updated for two years.

B

um This was before the marketplace listings and the marketplace listings require that each action live in its own repo, so we had to split them out just you know for discoverability, but we do have this umbrella, repo that lists what we do have, and so I'm going to talk through. There are three things in here um and so the one that I think is the most interesting to people.

B

Is this deploying a plug-in to the wordpress.org repository um and that's here again in its own little repo and so there's a whole readme, but basically what you need to do is you set a an svn username and an scn password secret in your repository because you're in your repository settings, these are encrypted and I don't know, ryan. You probably know more about how exactly all this works, but you set these secrets. um What's really great about that is that you can set like you could create just a committer user right like you.

B

Should you don't necessarily even need to add, like your own actual credentials so like for 10 up plugins, we have like a 10 bot user. That is just the committer on these and that way, if something happens, we can revoke it for everything, right, yeah, um nice and easy.

B

So, instead of going one by one, and so um you set some stuff and you can set up a file for excluding files- and so this is really helpful for if you do a build right, so you could like exclude source files that sort of thing, and then there are some sample baseline files. So with actions.

B

Some people here probably are pretty good with actions, but like are kind of skeptical about wordpress and they're, probably some people here who are really into wordpress but have like no idea what I'm talking about yeah with actions, and so what actions does is it? um You have what's called a workflow file that defines some things that you need a github computer to do for you yeah right, um and so what we have here is. We have some example, work profiles and I'll just talk through this one.

B

So um this one, what it says is like anytime, you create a release but publish a release on github, so this is like in the github ui, where you can create like make a new release and it creates a tag with it. So anytime, you make a new release on github, um it's gonna spin up an ubuntu machine, so a fancy little github computer. It's gonna check out the code.

B

This is literally doing like a git clone of of the uh of the tag that you've just created, yeah in the release, uh and then you can run build so here um this run command. This is just like just executing commands on the command line. Basically right so we're doing the npm install npm run, build and then this is where my action runs. So this is the 10 up action, wordpress plug and deploy, um and this is where it actually runs and I'll talk through what it actually does.

B

And then we have one argument where you can generate zip, true, some environment variables with your username and password and then that ends and that part itself does the stuff to deploy to subversion and then, if you've generated a zip, it will upload it to the release um right here in this step. So that's what the workflow does, and so you commit that to a specific place in your plug-in repository.

A

This workflow actually does okay, sorry, this thing, just I don't mean to slow you down a bit, but the workflow is this uh process you're already doing manually uh in like another environment? Oh.

B

Man, uh yes, it's uh it's replacing things that yeah, I would have had to run locally, okay um and then like copy stuff between folders and again. Remember like where stuff belongs. Okay,.

A

Gotcha so yeah, you basically be able to automate a portion of the workflow that would take more steps, perhaps um but through the sort of releases event workflow on github actions uh and then also curious in the chat. We do have quite a few people here today too as well. So if you do, if you know actions, uh let me know in the chat if you're familiar with actions, if you do not know anything about actions, let us know in the chat we can.

A

We can slow down, speed up uh and also same thing with wordpress any wordpress developers. Currently listening to this yeah.

B

I'm totally happy to take questions. I do have it open.

A

B

Over every once in a while yeah, so I'm not going to walk like step by step through a bash file. um Yes, I will talk about the hook docs, um so this batch file, uh it's doing a lot of stuff that you would have had to do manually previously like locally. You would have to be like okay, if I have an assets directory, where does it go um because the plugin repository so each plugin has its own full? It's actually one mono repo, all those like 60, 000 plugins, is a single subversion repository and that's.

B

Where is the version actually works? Well for that case, because subversion allows you to check out just one subfolder and assign permissions based on subfolders, so you can kind of operate within just one area. I've heard stories, yeah they're also bad stories, but for this case it does work well, um and so uh you kind of have to remember in your in your actual plugin directory itself. There is an a top level assets folder, then tags, branches and trunk, um and so trunk represents what would be like your primary.

B

Your main branch in git, um so it can- can reflect a development state and then the tags themselves would reflect like actual releases that are packaged into zips and um served up for download.

B

um And then you know sometimes people named you have like an assets directory right in your actual plug-in, and so you kind of get into this mess of like which are my actual plug-in assets, which are the assets that are specific for the plug-in directory right, and so we kind of do some magic here um to move stuff between a specifically named folder.

B

um There is a setting for it, uh and then we do all the subversion stuff for you like. We got your subversion repository um based on a slug uh and then it'll copy files over uh respecting, whichever ignore file that you decide to use.

B

Distignor is probably the one that most people want to use at this point so copies that stuff over copies over those specific plugin repository directory assets into the right place adds everything in subversion um checks the status. It copies the tag for you from trump to the tag. That's the part that many people either forget to do or I'll see like actually copy the directory locally and add it, but there is subversion copy as a command.

B

So you don't have to like copy the files yourself. um It does some more subversion stuff and then yeah. It commits those to subversion for you uh with a little it's a little message and then, if you've opted to generate a zip, it'll create a zip of that same plugin uh deployment and that's what it does. And so those are all the steps that you would have done previously manually.

B

Right, like you, would have run the build locally copied, the you know necessary files over remembering which ones you actually need having to add them in subversion, um and then you know having to commit them into the right place, create the tag and subversion right all these things that, like people just don't remember to do, because it's a lot of steps. Yeah.

A

B

You don't use subversion all the time, so this just does it for you. You create a new release on github and it just puts it out there for you. I think it's. I use it a lot, because I maintain a lot of plug-ins through tena uh and and that's how it goes so. I have an example here um I updated this plug-in recently and so yeah. This is my little action.

B

It took a minute and a half, and all I had to do was create a new github release and it put it out there for everybody so uh with the build and everything. So that makes me really happy.

A

um There's a question in chat: I'm not sure if it's a meme or a question but uh svn greater than uh are better than get.

B

I will tell you: there are a couple things that I do like about subversion. um I do like that. Subversions revision numbers are sequential.

B

um I understand like you know why git uses hashes and all that stuff, but um when your revision numbers are sequential, it actually gives you like a human insight into like how old something is right like was it a commit from a really long time ago, or was it something super recent? I just feel like that's a little more human and easy to understand off the bat rather than like having to jump around and like every git management tool has to build its own little like jump to the commit before this one.

A

B

Right because you can't just like back up sequentially yeah, um yeah yeah,.

A

I still don't understand the whole get magic of like when I open my git log and understanding like. Why is this commit over here and not like right before it? um So the way it works? um It's something I've never looked into it, but also, I don't really have the bandwidth to really get into it, because I got some other stuff I got to work on, but um but yeah sbn is something that I don't have a lot of experience with, but I do I've chatted with project scara and they had a very.

A

They actually migrated to github. uh Actually, they didn't migrate to get up there. They migrated to like a wordpress setup where they do have a um a mirror uh on github and they they use mercurial. So they had to do something similar, but now with actions. But it is a similar process if you're looking to leverage github uh for your projects, uh but you might have a whole community somewhere else, which I wanted to ask too as well, because it might not be clear.

A

This is a github twitch stream and a channel as well, but wordpress, currently not on github. No.

B

Well sure I'll just talk about it, um so yeah uh wordpress. um The way we run things is yes, the the central again central source of source of truth for the wordpress core software is on subversion posted on wordpress.org servers. um This subversion repository gets mirrored to a git repository also on wordpress.org.

B

That git repository is then mirrored onto github. Okay,.

A

B

And then on github you can submit pull requests. You just have to attach them to um a track ticket, so we use track for actual, like issue management, um lots of reasons, um and there are some things that I like about track much more than github issues. So this is kind of like an internal struggle, um but yeah we you can. uh No, you don't need to attach a zip, um so there's a field in track and also, I think we do some magic associations.

B

So if you just um the the full like track ticket url in the pr on github it'll associate it for you and it syncs back like the pr status like check status, and I think uh review comments um back over to track. um So we're kind of syncing stuff back is.

A

There is it similar to your the way you were deploying with github actions. Is there another sort of tool? That's powering the sort of syncing.

B

uh There is a tool, I don't know what it does. um I I don't work on dot, org infrastructure, so yeah somebody wrote something that associates all these things, um it's pretty clever, so so we do have that going on, so you can contribute code through github and we do use github actions in the core software to run tests. Now because we got like super, uh I don't know, there's not a nice way to say it. We just had problems with travis, uh so um we ran into like an emergency sort of situation.

B

We had to like swap everything over this basically two weeks, um so we yeah so we're on github actions now for testing as well um and we're like sort of slowly expanding um the editor project is its own repo and it uh so we have this block editor. So, yes, most of wordpress is like largely php based, um but the editor is written in react.

B

um It's called gutenberg.

B

Yeah, so gutenberg um runs as like a parallel project right. We, you know periodically. Sync it back, um but gutenberg is like it's like a mono repo. It releases actually to many npm packages uh from that one large repo um and that entire development process, the entire cycle, runs on github and they run a ton of actions for a lot of things, cleanup deployment, releasing all kinds of stuff um and so yeah.

B

So as a project like we very much, you know it's hard, it's hard to balance, because we very much believe in open source and the stewardship of it and using open source software ourselves. Right and you know, github is a service where the service side is not open source, and so that's like a constant conflict for us, but at the same time one of our values is there's the democratizing publishing that we talk about like for the the software goals but like as an open source community.

B

That's also our goal right to be as inclusive as possible, and sometimes that does mean that you have to go where the contributors are right. You have to go where people are comfortable, where people are able to do their best work with fewer barriers, and so right now.

B

This is where we are okay, and so we just constantly constantly evaluating like what are the best tools to like accomplish. It's.

A

Also, fair to point out too is wordpress, uh predates the existence of github too, as well. Wordpress has been around and they had systems and svn as well existing so to at the time, and when you were getting involved in 2008 to attach yourself, which was when github showed up as well, attach yourself to a new shiny thing. It might not be the best for the community, uh so it.

B

A

Best to figure out, oh wordpress, turns 18 in may excellent, um yes hundred nodes, yeah and, like I respect that too, as well and like I, I don't want it to be like. uh Why is wordpress not on github like that was not really the mention for the question, but I wanted to make sure folks were educated and that there are other. There are other ways.

A

People are doing open source so just know that those are the ways if you want to get involved, um but I think there's a nice little on-ramp if you do go to contribute with wordpress and you join the community you'll be um kind of shepherded into that situation. um Also gutenberg looks amazing. I haven't even looked at the editor in such a long time and it's.

B

A

It's a beautiful editor and I spent some time working on cms's at my previous employer. Netlify and I mean wordpress's editor is like the the thing that we point we point to as like a great experience.

B

Yeah yeah, I feel like for full disclosure uh tenoff actually did the the redo of the github vlog. I don't. I don't think we like continue to do work on it, but you are on wordpress and we need to have.

A

Create github.com, it's a wordpress blog.

B

Yep all right, so I guess back to actions.

A

Yeah, let's get back into action, yeah.

B

um One other thing to mention I'll just mention this one briefly uh is: there's also a parallel action, which is a an asset updater, so sometimes um with your wordpress plugins. It might continue working right, especially because we have this like commitment to backwards compatibility in the software, um which is you know, village sword, um but sometimes you need to just update your plugin to say it's still compatible with the latest version of wordpress right. So you don't need to tag a whole release. You don't need anything.

B

It's just like updating one line in a review file, um so there's also a parallel action that needs some love right now, so I need to get back to it, but the intention of it is that it goes through your like any time you commit something to the primary branch, so this is sort of assuming more of like a git flow work style where you have like an integration, develop style, branch right and then you have like your main trunk is actually what I name it so that it's very clear.

B

This is what sinks back to trunk on subversion, um and so anytime, you make a commit to that deployment branch right, the the like release, branch, um it goes through it, it checks and it says, like you know, does this have any differences from the subversion repository um other than readme and asset files, and if not, then it will go ahead and deploy just those readme and asset files for you, which is also pretty slick.

B

uh So again you you just like update the stuff in your release, branch and it will put that out there um for you. So you don't again don't have to remember subversion. You don't even have to check it out locally, like you could do all of that.

B

Just in the browser right, like you just edit, the readme in the browser and be done so that's super nice and then the thing that um I think a lot of people don't know about- uh and I think has been picking up more interest recently- is what are called hook docks. um So in wordpress we have we're called hooks um react people. uh There are also hooks. Oh yeah now, um but wordpress.

A

The hook term is being used. A lot in the javascript world at the moment is.

B

A

um But is it it's a similar construct when you think of hooks in wordpress.

B

Yes, um hooks in wordpress are very similar to the way they they work in jquery. I think if for people who maybe lived in jquery land back in the day or today, I don't know um so they're the same thing. So in wordpress there are two types um we have filters and actions, and so an action is something that just it says, hey I've reached this point.

B

Here's a place where you can say I want to execute some code right in this moment right at this point in this action, and then it has what are called filters and what a filter does is. It provides an original value of something and it allows you to alter that value so that going forward the next part of the code path. Has this altered value for you? um So that's.

B

Those are the two types of wordpress hooks and one of the one of the hardest things, especially when you get into like custom development is trying to find all those hooks um so like. How do I know what action runs where?

B

How do I know what parameters are passed to this filter so that I can like you know, change my content based on you know the post id or something right, yeah, and so the wordpress core software project spent years documenting all of the hooks and then creating a generated hook, documentation resource and that's at actually on developer.wordpress.org and there's a code reference here, um and so this is where you can see all of these uh yeah.

B

These are hooks, so this one's a filter, for instance, so block type metadata, so metadata associated with a type of block, and you can filter alter that array of metadata based on you know whatever it is that you need to do so. These are the hook docs that wordpress core software has, but in your custom, plugins right and especially for large plug-in projects or ones that are geared toward developers and meant to be extended using hooks.

B

What do we do for creating documentation? So I have an action. I'm going to show you what the output looks like first. um So this is a plug-in that I maintained through tenant called classify it's like to bring. um You know, mlai stuff services to your wordpress site, so it can like automatically generate alt tags for images and that sort of thing, I think I think it's super cool, but I'm not here to like sell you on my plugin.

B

um You can ask questions about it, uh but what we have here is um we generate this documentation and it's hosted on github pages, so you can see it's 10out.github.io classify. um This is just hosting github pages, and what we have here is all of our actions and filters uh right here. So um let's say we want to check out this. One classified should classify post right, so um this shows you like. What does the call look like um gives you some plaintext description? All of this is generated from the php.

B

This is all inline documentation that is pulled out and turned into these cute little static pages.

B

So it tells you what kind of parameters you have the type of the parameter, what it is um so like this case we default to true like yes, we should try to classify this post, um but you could say, like I'm gonna, make it false if it's tagged with something in particular right, so you can go through and kind of, detect that and be like. Okay. Actually, I'm gonna set this to false because it gives you the post id.

B

So you can like retrieve all the information about the post and be like okay, based on this piece of information in the post data. I don't want to actually run the classification, um so this is what hooked augmentation can look like and again this is all auto generated.

B

So what I have here is this actually is not an action that I wrote. This is using other people's actions and that's, what's so cool to me about github actions. Is that, like I, don't necessarily have to script anything myself, I can go and get some different pieces and put them together into something that does what I need it to do so, rather than providing an action.

B

What I have here is I just I just have a documentation page, a markdown file explaining to you how this works, um and so what you need to do is it does use the js doc standard. That sounds very weird: we're putting js doc standard on php doc, they're extremely similar. There's only really one difference which is there are two differences. One is one of the app parameters and then the others like it has curly braces around the type. um But it's it's like super super, simple um to kind of format it that way.

B

If you want to use this, and so it explains what you need, there's js, doc, formatted doc blocks, um you create a build command in your npm. Typically, in your like your package, json file um configuration file the workflow file, and then you need a personal access token because of deploying github pages. I don't know if this has changed yet.

B

I know that they were talking about it, but right now or as a as of the last time, I checked you needed to generate a personal access token to actually be able to deploy to github pages, and so it just talks about like what do you need to do for templating?

B

What are some other options that are there, how to test it locally? It's super easy to test locally and then here's some examples of what a doc block looks like again, the minor differences from the php docs standard. uh What what some parts of your package.json might look like what the configuration might look like for you.

B

Again, it's very very small and then an example workflow file, and so in the workflow you can see again. All we do is we check it out. We set up node to be the correct version again I know. Sometimes I don't check this stuff. I don't know if this is still necessary at the time it was. um We do the install. We run the build right.

B

This is the the command we added to our package json and then, after we run the build, um it deploys it to github pages just like that, uh and so what the build command is doing. I guess I should show but uh yeah it just does that it builds into a directory called hook docs and then that directory is then deployed to github pages. It's like magic and it's super cool.

B

So that makes me really happy and I've started to see people talking about like how do I, you know, provide people with developer documentation, and I just think that again we're we're on github as developers right and so to be able to kind of leverage the same platform that we're already on and use github pages, which lots of plugins like we're not doing anything with github pages as it is. So why not put the hook? Documentation there right, um and so that's that's been super fun for me- is like figuring out again.

B

What's something that could be usable for everybody solves my problems, but also it should solve a lot of other people's problems. Yeah.

A

And I think the one thing you pointed to as well is the fact that you had just the markdown page of explaining how it works uh and in the workflow uh the fact that again we are on github. uh You could, I could say the steal ideas, but I guess yeah steal ideas. As long as mit or something open license, you can steal it all into your heart's content, um but being able to build on. What's already there, I think is like where the real win is there.

B

Yeah, absolutely I see it as like putting like lego together right. It's like here's, a bunch of stuff that exists for me like I don't have to do like. I don't have to inject the plastic myself right like I don't have to do that. I just grab the bricks and put them together and it does the thing that I wanted to do, uh and so that's yeah.

B

That's what I've really been enjoying about messing with github actions, because, like historically I'm kind of like a devops dummy like I'm, really good at breaking stuff, I'm famous for I'm really good at breaking stuff, um and so for me to be able to like actually figure this out and and provide something. That's helpful has been fun for me, too. Yeah.

A

Yeah yeah yeah. Well, uh I did also point out that dimension data has a better. Let's just borrow the code right steal it. I think that's better and uh philadelphia. Welcome from royal town, I'm not really sure where that is, but thanks for calling it out, um and the other thing that you also mentioned too is around the understanding of things like gutenberg and how it's it's using.

A

You know, react and javascript and on github the full experience is there and acknowledging that, like there is a movement of people doing open source on github, uh maybe people other people have noticed, um but the fact that we're able to tap into all that skill and talent, um because I also don't come from a sre background. um I kind of just really picked it up when I joined github because a lot of that sort of devops stuff, I had other people in my company in my company at my the company I worked for.

A

uh That was that did that much easier and faster than I did so I just fixed stuff that broke. If I broke it, but move away as fast as possible. Yeah absolutely.

B

A

um I'm curious, though, uh from your vantage point um and do you see other wordpress devs who are tapped into the uh the sort of idea with github actions and powering their deployments of their plug-ins and stuff like that.

B

Yeah uh definitely so I know internally at 10 up like we do have some like actual like cd going on it's like we're using it to deploy places um I get. You know. The plug-in deployment is also sort of like that, but you don't tag plugins nearly as often as like you deploy a website right. um So so I do see people doing that.

B

I know that they're, some other people who do a lot of work on the core software as well and are like me and also work at agencies right so like there are a number of us who are like sponsored through agencies or plug-in development shops and we're sponsored to work on wordpress, which is a big part of that ecosystem as well.

B

So I do know that there are a lot of people who work on things like linting actions.

B

We have our like a specific phpcs, so like coding, standards, specific to wordpress styles, and so integrating that and taking advantage of annotations, which I think are really freaking cool um in in the way that uh those can run on github. So if people haven't seen this, I should have pulled up an example, but if you haven't seen this like, if you, if um somebody sets up minting correctly in using github actions, um there are other services that'll, do it, but honestly, look it's just easier to just run in on github.

B

um It supports annotations, and so what it does is instead of just like spitting out a report of like here are the lines and like the problems that were on those lines. It actually injects this directly into the pr view so like when you're in the code view and a pr under line.

B

You know, 13 in your pr it'll be like here, was a php coding, standard error, you're missing a space or something right, um and it does this, like inline in the code review view um in a pr and so like if you're the contributor or the maintainer, you can go through and like apply.

B

Those changes um like again in the web ui, which is um a thing that I'm really on about, is that's a big part to me of, like how do you include as many contributors as possible right is understanding that your contributor base may only have one device right so like and especially like newer generations like they may only have a phone right. They may not even have like their own computer or they're on like a chromebook or something where you don't actually have like system access right.

B

All you have is a browser right, it's very common, or maybe it's somebody who's only accesses through, like their local library or something right. These are all people who are perfectly valuable have just as much to say, and so this idea of, like being able to bring more of this process into the web browser, is super powerful right. The ability to like do a code review to apply small changes or make big changes, um and then one of the other things like that github is working on.

B

I need to figure this out for wordpress um the code. Spaces stuff is super cool to me yeah, because to me it's it's. This idea of, like what I haven't figured out is how to make it actually run a wordpress site because wordpress stores the site url in the database. So I haven't figured out that part yet um with the with the port forwarding, um but like.

A

Imagine sorry, I'm not trying to be a your.

B

A

Engineer uh the database that wordpress uses is it sql based or a certain flavor? Yes, yeah, okay, yeah.

B

I wonder if you could use one of.

A

The um one of the cloud, so if it would it be sqlite, could you use that? I don't I don't know? Okay, probably not yeah,.

B

A

I've been playing around with a lot of cool of these hosted, uh sql or postgres database solutions right.

B

A

Like outside of my work at github, but like I've, been flying around like some of the postgres solutions like planet scale and super bass um that you can just pipe it to a url, that's already hosted, um it could be a solution. uh It just depends.

B

Yeah, I think the the problem I was running into is that, because we store what we what we do is we store the site url in the database and so with port forwarding and code spaces. It's like dynamically, generating a url and so there's. I have not figured out how you can get that url and then shove it into the database or write it into a config file as an override so that you can actually access the wordpress site through the port forwarding yeah.

A

I I should introduce you to someone on the team and they can they can help you out with that make.

B

It work for me yeah, that's what this is.

B

That's what this is all about right, it's like finding the right people but yeah like I just imagine that you know you're working on something as complex as the editor right, which is this huge react app and you want to test a change but you're like on the go or like I'm a parent right so like I might be like sitting in my kitchen on my ipad or something, and so the idea that, like I could spin up a remote environment that does the build from that pull request from that branch whatever and be able to test it like wherever I am on, whatever device I have or if I need to do mobile testing right and not have to worry about like building it locally, trying to set up a web server inside my house or you know whatever.

B

So if I want to do this sort of mobile testing to be able to do it all through you know, one place again um is super powerful to me, and so that's like, I think to me. That's probably like my next big thing that I need to dive into on the like: how does wordpress use github front.

A

Yeah yeah, but this was a fun conversation. I really enjoyed.

B

Learning about wordpress.

A

Learn about your your use of actions to sort of keep the system or the lights on. I guess uh but yeah, it's nice.

B

A

To look over the shoulders of other developers and see how they're sort of solving problems so.