Manually managing updates for WordPress and your installed plugins and themes can be a hassle and cause unforeseen consequences when running in production.

It also makes it almost impossible to deploy new versions of your software in a reliable way using CI/CD systems.

Something not widely known among WordPress developers is that the package manager Composer can be used to manage plugin and theme dependencies if properly configured.

Such a system offers a lot of advantages, including allowing for proper versioning using any VSC (such as git, for example) – and consequently, an easy way to rollback if something breaks.

It also allows for CI/CD systems to be put in place, so you can make sure deploys only reach production when everything looks safe and sound.

Setting up such a system from scratch would require a great deal of server ops knowledge. Thankfully, we don’t need to start from scratch. Most of the heavy-lifting was done for us by the folks over at Bedrock.

This advanced lesson will cover how you can get Bedrock to run multisite, install WP Ultimo and its add-ons as composer requirements, and more.