Apache. How to move wp-config.php and wp-content outside from wordpress core?

Question

I want to use one wordpress core for all my themes when i develop them on my local machine. For example wordpress core located on C:\xampp\wordpress\www and it has a VirtualHost from Apache https://wordpress.local. Themes located on C:\gulp\projects and here is located all projects (folders) with static websites and here is i want to store all my wp themes in their own folder. Inside of each wp theme folder is wp-config.php and the wp-content folder. I want to store each wp theme folder on git versioning and i planning switch projects by gulp just by replacing paths in wp configs in the core. I plan to do this only on local machine and only for development reasons and i just want push changes on server. I don't want to create a new virtual domain and folders in apache for each new project and i don't want to grab wordpress core to git versioning.

I tried to change paths in configs in the core define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', ‘C:\gulp\projects\TEST-WP-THEME\wp-content’ ), but unfortunately wp core can't "see" the directory and there is white screen only when i go to my domain in the browser. I suppose that apache can't "see" directories outside C:\xampp\wordpress\www, but i believe that it is possible to configure apache that it may hook up directories outside from "server". How to hook up external wp-config.php and the wp-content folder to the wp core, who knows how to do this please help me.

Answer 1

After long time i publish my solution. For example: the WP core will be stored in C://wordpress.local/ folder and for that folder we'll create a http://wordpress.local domain. All projects will be in C://projects/. Each project has its own wp-content folder, wp-config-dev.php (for DB credentials and table prefix) and usual wp-config.php that we deploy on the server.

We'll take a project called example in C://projects/example/wp.

Core's wp-config.php

<?php
$project = 'example';
define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', 'C:/projects/'.$project.'/wp/wp-content' );
define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', 'https://projects.folder/'.$project.'/wp/wp-content' );
include('C:/projects/'.$project.'/wp/wp-config-dev.php');
if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) {
    define( 'ABSPATH', dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/' );
}
require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php' );
// custom functions (optional)
include('custom.php');

Project's wp-core-dev.php

<?php
define( 'DB_NAME', 'example' );
define( 'DB_USER', 'root' );
define( 'DB_PASSWORD', '' );
define( 'DB_HOST', 'localhost' );
define( 'DB_CHARSET', 'utf8mb4' );
define( 'DB_COLLATE', '' );
$table_prefix = 'wp_';

In additional you have to share your projects folder as domain in Apache's httpd-vhosts.conf

<Directory "C://projects/*">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>

# For WP_CONTENT_URL
<Directory "C://projects">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "C://projects"
    ServerName projects.folder
    # CORS
    Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
</VirtualHost>

And voila, you may switch between projects just with changing the $project variable, personally i do it with bash script and sed.

---

Bonus. Put all our projects in WP admin bar and make project selector.

Add function to your .bashrc

function wp-set-project {
    local projname="$*"
    # in my case $project is always on second line
    sed -i "2s|.*|\$project = '$projname';|" /c/wordpress.local/wp-config.php
}

Edit optional custom.php file that we include in core's wp-config.php

add_action('admin_bar_menu', 'add_project_switch', 999);
function add_project_switch($admin_bar){

//get current project name from $project variable, read second line from file
preg_match('/\'(.*?)\'/', file('C://wordpress.local/wp-config.php')[1], $result);
$currWpProject = $result[1]; //result from second mask without quotes

//get all projects
$wpProjects = array();
foreach(glob('C://projects/*/wp', GLOB_ONLYDIR) as $proj) {
    $wpProjects[] = explode('/', $proj)[3]; //get dir name
}

$admin_bar->add_menu( array(
    'id'    => 'curr-proj',
    'title' => '🚧 Project: '.$currWpProject,
));

foreach($wpProjects as $proj) {
    if ($proj !== $currWpProject) {
        $admin_bar->add_menu( array(
            'id'    => 'project-'.$proj,
            'parent' => 'curr-proj',
            'title' => $proj,
            'href'  => '?setWp='.$proj, //make link with get parametr
        ));
    }
}

}

//Call our bash function if there is passed GET with project name
$setWp = filter_input( INPUT_GET, 'setWp');

if($setWp){
    //for running bash that way in Windows you have to put your bash.exe in PATH
    shell_exec ('bash -c "source ~/.bashrc && wp-set-project '.$setWp.'"');
    header("Location: "."http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
    exit();
}

Eventually we got a nice and convenient project selector: