Duty Now for the Future

WordPress developers have been refining their development workflows and toolkits for 12 years now. As game changing server technologies like Facebook's HHVM start to creep into the WordPress hosting space — WP Engine, Pagely & Kinsta all offer HHVM-ready plans — those workflows need to be expanded.

I'll be introducing you to a new Vagrant-based WordPress development environment (HGV) that includes debugging and profiling tools and allows you to test your code in both PHP & HHVM environments.

In order to follow along, a passing familiarity with the command line helps, but isn't a hard requirement.

Transcript

1. Duty Now for the Future
2. In the past this information has been suppressed but now it can be told
3. We're all Devo
4. We're all Devs
5. Let's look to the future
6. The futch
7. PHP 7
8. PHP 7 Beta June 2015
9. PHP 7 Release November 2015 (Probably)
10. There's a PHP 7 Vagrant
11. Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases development/production parity, and makes the "works on my machine" excuse a relic of the past. — About Vagrant
12. Caveat
13. PHP version adoption stinks (Especially at the host level)
14. Let's look at PHP 5 adoption
15. The Majority 1 • PHP 5.3 — 41.4% • Release Date: June 30, 2009 • End of Life: August 14, 2014 • PHP 5.4 — 30.1% • Release Date: March 1, 2012 • End of Life: September 12, 2015 1 Numbers from w3Techs as of June 2, 2015.
16. Let that sink in...
17. 71.5% of all PHP sites are powered by versions that will be dead by the end of Summer 2015
18. Legacy PHP bad
19. The Minority 1 • PHP 5.5 — 9.3% • Release date: June 20, 2013 • End of Life: June 20, 2016 • PHP 5.6 — 1.5% • Release Date: August 28, 2014 • End of Life: August 28, 2017 1 Numbers from w3Techs as of June 2, 2015.
20. PHP 5.5 will be End of Life'd by this time next year
21. How long will it be until enough hosts support PHP 7?
22. How long can we wait?
23. There is another
24. HHVM
25. How is HHVM better? HHVM compiles PHP to an intermediate bytecode. The bytecode then gets translated to machine code by a just-in- time (JIT) compiler. Doing this removes the usual interpreted execution bottlenecks that come with using native PHP. On top of that, HHVM analyzes your code as it runs. After it collects enough data, HHVM performs optimizations on what it considers to be frequently invoked and expensive pieces of code. TL;DR: It's fast. And smart.
26. But how much faster? WordPress 4.1.x with 20 concurrent users. • Requests per second • PHP 5.5: 256 • PHP 7: 627 • HHVM 3.7: 666 • Latency • PHP 5.5: 78 milliseconds • PHP 7: 32 milliseconds • HHVM 3.7: 30 milliseconds
27. So what's the catch? • The HHVM compiler is strict. • If you're using poorly written code, things can go sideways. Fast. • The occasional memory leak. • Long running PHP processes can chew up tons of RAM. • Scheduled restarts of HHVM processes are not uncommon.
28. But don't let that scare you There are large companies already using HHVM in production • Facebook • Wikipedia • Etsy • Box
29. HHVM-ready Hosts • WP Engine • DreamHost • Pagely • SiteGround • Kinsta
30. There's an HHVM Vagrant And it's made for WordPress development
31. HGV https://github.com/wpengine/hgv
32. Built by WP Engine for our Mercury platform
33. No matter where you host your site, you can use HGV to test your code
34. HGV • Built with members of the 10up team • Work on your code under PHP 5.5 & HHVM at the same time • Debugging & benchmarking tools • Xdebug • XHProf • Siege • query-monitor • debug-objects • debug-bar
35. Installing HGV is easyish
36. Prerequisites • Git • VirtualBox or VMware • Vagrant • The Vagrant::Hostsupdater plugin https://goo.gl/KpA928 ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" brew install git brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask brew cask install vagrant brew cask install virtualbox vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
37. Install git clone --recursive https://github.com/wpengine/hgv.git cd hgv vagrant up
38. While HGV installs, make yourself a drink It should only take about 30 minutes
39. Get to work • Local file access • Use your favorite text editor! • [HGV_dir]/hgv_data/sites/[hhvm|php]/ • [HGV_dir]/hgv_data/sites/[hhvm|php]/wp-content/ [plugins|themes]/ • SSH • vagrant ssh • phpMyAdmin • admin.hgv.dev/phpmyadmin/
40. Coming Soon in HGV 1.3 • One Vagrant to rule them all • Configure multiple installs & domains • Adds the domains to your hosts file • Provisioned via a YML file --- enviro: trunk hhvm_domains: - hhvm.trunk.hgv.dev php_domains: - trunk.hgv.dev
41. So we've got that goin' for us, which is nice
42. Questions?
43. It's time to go beyond the normal thing. It's time to do the super thing. Follow @boogah on Twitter.