Making Wordpress Domain-agnostic
I like Wordpress a lot. It’s one of my favorite open-source projects, and I use it often for both my professional and personal projects. It’s been my go-to web development framework for a number of years now.
There’s one thing I don’t like about Wordpress, though: the domain to which a
Wordpress site is deployed is saved as a setting in its database. I don’t think
that was a good design decision, because it makes it painful to move a
Wordpress site from one domain to another. This shortcoming is especially
evident if you’re trying to develop a Wordpress site on one domain, but would
like to deploy to another. (For example, I always set up my local sandbox such
that the WIP lives at example.dev, while deployments are pushed to
example.com). I really wish Wordpress had been designed to path against its
own document root, much like MediaWiki (another great piece of web software).
A while ago, though, I came up with a little hack to make Wordpress do exactly that.
If you read the Wordpress documentation, it turns out that the settings stored in the Wordpress database can be overridden by defining these two constants:
You can easily set those values dynamically like this:
/** Make sandbox development a little easier */
define('WP_HOME', "http://{$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']}/");
define('WP_SITEURL', "http://{$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']}/");
If you add those lines somewhere to your wp-config.php file, you no longer
have to worry about updating your database when you’re developing on one domain
and deploying to another. It can really make your life a lot easier when you’re
doing Wordpress development.