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3. Adding a New Site

Adding a New Site

Adding a new site is as simple as adding it under the sites section of vvv-custom.yml. If vvv-custom.yml does not exist, you can create it by copying vvv-config.yml to vvv-custom.yml.

To do this there are five steps:

I’m going to walk through setting up a blog named vvvtest.com locally using VVV, but this could be a site currently hosted in MAMP.

If you’re migrating a site from VVV 1, read this page, then visit the migration page for further details.

You may also find that the default sites created by VVV are enough for what you need. Read about the default sites here

Remember: Always reprovision after making changes to vvv-custom.yml

vvv-custom.yml and the Root Folder

First we need to tell VVV about the site. I’m going to give the site the name vvvtest, and update the sites list in vvv-custom.yml:

vvvtest:

We also want to specify the host as vvvtest.com:

vvvtest:
  hosts:
    - vvvtest.com

Read here for more information about Domains and hosts

Files

Now that VVV knows about our site with the name vvvtest, it’s going to look inside the www/vvvtest folder for our site. We need to create and fill this folder. If I had named the site testables, the folder would be www/testables.

After creating the folder, create a provision subfolder, e.g. www/testables/provision. See more below about what goes in this folder.

If you’d like to change the folders VVV uses, read here for more information

Copying In Site Files

If you have an existing site you want to work with, you will be able to manually copy the site files into the public_html or equivalent subdirectory created when the site is provisioned.

As an alternative, rather than manually copying files into the folder, copy them into a git repository, and use the repo key to tell VVV where to find it.

With this, you can automate a large chunk of the work for new users when working in a team, and encourage healthy version control workflows!

For example:

vvvtest:
  repo: https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/custom-site-template.git
  hosts:
    - vvvtest.com

We strongly recommend this.

Provisioner Files

The following files should be created within the provision folder created above:

vvv-hosts can be one line with the hostname of the new site set above, e.g. vvvtest.com.

vvv-init.sh determines how VVV will download, install, and setup WordPress. Read about vvv-init.sh and find an example to copy/paste here.

Nginx config

VVV uses Nginx as a web server, but Nginx needs to know how to serve a WP site. Luckily VVV provides those rules, requiring only a small config file that works for 99% of WP sites.

For our example below, we only need to change the domain/host and copy paste the result into provision/vvv-nginx.conf:

server {
  listen 80;
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name vvvtest.com;
  root {vvv_path_to_site};

  error_log {vvv_path_to_site}/log/error.log;
  access_log {vvv_path_to_site}/log/access.log;

  set $upstream {upstream};

  include /etc/nginx/nginx-wp-common.conf;
}

For more information about Nginx and VVV, read the Nginx Configs page of adding a new site.

Reprovision

Any time we make changes to vvv-custom.yml or the provisioner files of a site, we need to restart VVV. This allows VVV to catch up with the latest changes and activates your new site.

To do this, run vagrant reload --provision.

Database

Now our site is active and running in VVV, but there’s no content. We need to transfer the database contents into the database running inside VVV.

There are several ways to do this: