SOP: Documentation Site Maintenance

The PFP Logistics documentation sites , like most of the PFP technical services, requires routine monitoring and maintenance.

Here are the current notes for ongoing maintenance and monitoring as of November 2022.

About

The documentation sites are running WordPress on an AWS Lightsail instance.

Task: Software Updates

Frequency: Monthly
Role: WordPress Administrator level login

WordPress, like any other software, releases regular updates. Often these updates include security updates. As such it is important to keep both the core WordPress application as well as supporting plugins and themes up-to-date.

The Process

1. Login to the website
   The URL is for WordPress login access is <hostname>.pfplogistics.com/wp-admin/
   for example techdocs.pfplogistics.com/wp-admin/
2. Go to the Dashboard | Updates section
   This is listed in the WordPress admin sidebar.
3. Update WordPress first, then any plugins, then themes.
   The process is usually seamless, click the update links and within a few minutes the in-place update should be completed.

Task: Backup Check

Frequency: Monthly
Role: AWS User with Amplify management access

All documentation sites running on AWS Lightsail should be created with daily snapshots managed by the AWS Lightsail service. These snapshots serve as a “full server” backup, including the application (WordPress , plugins, and themes) as well as the data (MySQL hosted on the same server).

Lightsail instances tend to be very resilient, however things can go wrong. While it is rare that the cloud technology itself fails, user-initiated issues (oops, deleted a post I shouldn’t have), and developer-caused failures (that plugin update just crashed the site) do happen more frequently. While some things, like post deletions, can be recovered fairly easily in WordPress (you can restore a deleted post from trash within 30 days) — others cannot. This is where the daily snapshots are important.

The Process

1. Login to AWS with a user that has Amplify management privileges
   https://aws.amplify.com
2. Go to Amplify on the services menu
3. Click on the Lightsail instance you want to check for backups
4. Click the snapshots tab
   Ensure that there are backups for each day over the past week.