As a former programmer, I learned the hard way not to mess with production until you were sure you had tested all changes thoroughly. How do you set up a DigitalOcean droplet to enable such staging of changes?
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Hey @CharleyKiser 👋
One simple approach is to spin up a separate Droplet that mirrors your production environment as closely as possible, same OS, web server, database, WordPress version, etc. You can take a snapshot of your production Droplet and create a new one from it, or set up a fresh Droplet and restore from a backup or export.
Make sure to:
-
Use a different subdomain like
staging.example.com -
Restrict access with a password or IP rules so it’s not publicly indexed
-
Sync data from production (carefully) if needed, but avoid accidentally sending real emails or triggering live services
If you’re using App Platform or automation tools like Terraform, you can replicate environments even more cleanly.
- Bobby
Heya, @charleykiser
You can use Docker Compose to containerise your entire app stack (e.g., NGINX, PHP, MySQL, WordPress). Then you can spin up an identical staging environment on the same droplet, a separate one, or even locally.
I believe this can help you to manage everything.
Regards
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