Testing a Patch

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

Testing Core tickets with Playground

Some tickets can be tested without setting up your own local environment by using WordPress Playground, an online platform that allows you to experiment and learn about WordPress without affecting your live website. It’s a virtual sandbox where you can play around with different features, designs, and settings in a safe and controlled environment. Learn more about WordPress Playground here, and see the testing team handbook for instructions on testing a core patch in Playground.

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.

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

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).

Testing without Grunt

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