Testing a Patch

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Testing patches is an important part of ensuring the quality of WordPress releases.

Setting up without VVV

If you use VVV, skip to the section below.

Grunt is a command runner that allows you to test patches that have been uploaded to Trac. To use Grunt, follow these steps:

  1. Install nodejs and npm to your development environment.
  2. Clone the develop WordPress repository located at https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/
  3. Run npm install to get all the dependencies.
  4. Run npm run grunt build to get the fully-built version
  5. Setup your server to use /build as the root (varies depending on how your development environment is setup).
  6. In order for changes to /src to be reflected in /build, run npm run grunt watch while you are working.
  7. Alternatively, you can use /src as your document root, which may be much more convenient for PHP-focused development. You’ll need to run npm run grunt build -- --dev once, but after that you don’t need npm run grunt watch at all, unless you’re changing JavaScript/CSS. If you are, then use npm run grunt watch -- --dev instead of npm run grunt watch.

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Setting up with VVV

VVV includes support for WP Core Development, and you can find the settings on the config.yml file.

If you use VVV, a site can be added that contains a full WP Core development build. If you open config/config.yml there is a site pre-pepared for this, but disabled out of the box. Look for wordpress-trunk and change skip_provisioning from true to false, it should look like this:

  wordpress-trunk:
    skip_provisioning: true
    description: "An git based WP Core trunk dev setup, useful for contributor days, Trac tickets, patches"
    repo: https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/custom-site-template-develop.git
    hosts:
      - trunk.wordpress.test
    custom:
      vcs: git # using 'svn' will force this vcs

Once saved, reprovision with vagrant up --provision. VVV will download and prepare a developer environment for working on core and testing. This new site will be located in the www/wordpress-trunk/public_html folder.

Inside the site there will be 2 folders, src and build. Changes made in the src folder are processed by a tool called grunt and put in the build folder. This happens automatically by running the command npm run grunt watch in the www/wordpress-trunk/public_html folder. For example:

vagrant ssh
cd /srv/www/wordpress-trunk/public_html
npm run grunt watch

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Testing with Grunt

Now that Grunt is setup, type in npm run grunt patch:####, replacing #### with either a ticket number from Trac or a patch URL. This will download the patch and apply the changes to your development environment.

Note: If you receive a Cannot find module 'grunt-cli/bin/grunt' error, run the following and then try again:

rm -rf node_modules && npm install

Ready to test your environment? Use npm run grunt test to automatically run automated tests. Note that this step requires PHPUnit to be installed.

If you’re a committer, be sure to run npm run grunt precommit before committing code, especially code that touches anything on the front-end (CSS/JS).

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Testing without Grunt

See https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/tutorials/working-with-patches/#applying-a-patch-with-the-command-line

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