Move to production

Share your new WordPress theme with the world

Building for production

Before deployment, you’ll want to create a production build:

npm run prod

This ensures all unneeded CSS declarations have been removed and also minifies the resulting style.css file.

Deployment via zip archive

To package your theme as a zip archive, you can use the bundle command:

npm run bundle

This command will first execute npm run prod and then create a zip archive from your theme folder, in a file named after your theme slug.

The resulting theme archive can be uploaded directly to a WordPress site. Since WordPress 5.5, uploading a theme that has already been installed will result in an option to overwrite the existing theme, providing a viable path for quick deployments.

If you have copied your development theme from your local development environment to your production server as part of your initial deployment, you will notice that uploading the zip file created by the bundle script doesn’t overwrite the development version. In this case, you can activate the newly uploaded version and then delete the development version from your production server.

Other deployment options

When deploying via other means, you’ll need to keep three things in mind:

• You should always run npm run prod before deploying
• Generated files (like style.css and script.min.js) aren’t committed to git by default
• Only the ./theme folder should be deployed to production

If you’d like to deploy from the command line, Deployer and Capistrano are both great solutions for the command-line deployment of WordPress themes. SpinupWP also has a detailed look at Deploying WordPress using the Command Line showing several different techniques.

GitHub Actions and Envoyer are excellent options as well.