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I need to find an ongoing staging solution for my WordPress website. The website is hosted on digital ocean.
I imagine that the way this could work is:
- I create a new installation of WordPress on my digital ocean droplet.
- Then import a back up of everything except for the uploads.
- I somehow have the WordPress staging installation look to the real website for uploads. This is all to save on duplicating uploads, which are the most space intensive.
- At this point, I should have a staging site that looks and acts just like the live site.
- So then let’s say that I make some changes on the staging site, I uploaded some photos. I edit some posts. I create some new pages. When I’m happy with the changes, I click a button or something to commit those changes to the live website.
- When those changes are committed the live WordPress website, the database gets updated, and any new files uploaded to the staging site are moved to the live site.
Now, I don’t know that any of this actually does work this way, but it seems plausible and I sort of expect someone has developed a solution that does work this way.
What do you think, what do you know about WordPress staging solutions with digital ocean?
How much control do you have over the droplet? Can you install software? There is a database called [Dolt](https://www.dolthub.com/) that is basically MySQL + Git, which would allow you to branch your WordPress database so you could have a mirror for staging, then merge changes back into live.
Dolt should work in place of MySQL but you would have to have it installed on your host, which is something I’m not sure that you could do on Digital Ocean. Maybe you could spin up a second droplet running Dolt and point the DB of the first droplet at the Dolt droplet? It’s something to look into.