The Branch Blog

Guess who’s back?

Hey there, Keanan here! If you haven’t been following the latest changes and developments within Branch, let me catch you up.

Branch has continued humming along for existing customers over the past few months, but new signups have been closed off since April 2021. I acquired Branch from Peter Suhm, along with its older brother WP Pusher, in September and announced my decision to reopen Branch shortly.

Today is that day: Branch is once again open for new users.

I encourage you to take a look through the homepage and some of the existing documentation on the site. Whether you need to run unit tests, Lighthouse scores, custom WP-CLI commands or almost anything else you can think of, Branch is the place to do it.

As we move forward, I’m especially excited to continue making Branch one of the best developer tools in the WordPress ecosystem. Our mission has always been and continues to be to help developers of all types deploy their code safely and automatically. 

To help this along, we’ll be uploading more YouTube videos, documentation, and general inspiration. This is give more insight into how Branch can be integrated into your side projects, daily workflow, and everything else in between. There are some great features up ahead on the roadmap that I’m really excited about, and which you can start experimenting with beginning today absolutely free of charge.

If you have any further concerns, if there’s a workflow you’re trying to support that you don’t see documented, send me an email at keanan@branchci.com or DM me on Twitter @kkoppenhaver. I’ll be more than happy to jump on a call with you and figure out the best way to get you started with Branch.

Let me know what you think and keep an eye out for some incredible stuff coming soon!

New feature: Duplicate sites

We just shipped a new button in Branch!

You can find it under Settings for your site and if you click it, it’ll duplicate the site for you.

What’s included?

  • The pipeline
  • The meta settings (default Git branch)
  • The SSH key

What’s not included?

  • The Git repository (you get to pick a new one)
  • The environment variables

Reusing the SSH key is helpful in situation where you are setting up a lot of sites that need to connect to something where you don’t want to manually upload a lot of different SSH keys.

Enjoy! 🙏

🎙 Billable Hours Season 1 is live

I’m really excited to announce that we just started releasing season 1 of our new podcast Billable Hours. The podcast (this season at least) is for WordPress agencies and freelance shops covering business and the tech behind it.

Subscribe now to have the 10 episodes delivered to your favorite podcatcher

Season 1 is 10 episodes, covering the following topics:

  • Productized Services
  • Moving Into Products
  • Recurring Revenue
  • Building a Diverse and Inclusive Agency
  • Gutenberg
  • Static and Headless WordPress
  • Laravel for WordPress Developers
  • Growing and Scaling an Agency
  • Accessibility
  • Progressive Web Apps

All topics that are super relevant to you if you are building an agency or running a freelance shop.

The first 3 episodes are live now. You can find them at BillableHours.co.

Ps. If you want to help out, please share the podcast with your network. It would mean a lot to us. Thanks 🙏

Branch for teams

Our vision for Branch is to be the best way for agencies to deploy WordPress projects. And what are agencies? Agencies are groups of people working together to solve client problems. So naturally we are excited to finally launch proper team access to Branch!

» Continue reading “Branch for teams”

New recipe: Deploy to Servebolt

We just released our new Servebolt recipe. With this recipe you can easily deploy from GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab to your Servebolt sites.

This recipe works great with some of the test and QA recipes, such as Lighthouse, PHP syntax code checks etc.

Try it for free, by signing up for a Branch account.

What we’re working on at Branch these days

This email was sent to the Branch early access and user list on March 20th. I thought I would share it here on the blog as well.

Hey friend,

As most of us in the digital workforce are working from home, I thought I’d take a moment to share what we’re working on at Branch. It’s certainly not the easiest time to focus on work with the current news stream. All the anxiety and panic can make it very hard to think about work – does it even matter? However I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to shut down the entire world, so the parts that we can keep moving we probably should.

» Continue reading “What we’re working on at Branch these days”

📣 Announcing Build Recipes

Today was a big day at the virtual Branch office. We released the biggest overhaul of the UI to date. We completely re-imagined how build recipes work in the product. With this update, it’s all plug & play. Pick the tools you use, hit build and be done with it.

Watch the screencast in the beginning on this post to see build recipes in action.

» Continue reading “📣 Announcing Build Recipes”

Who is Branch for?

This morning I had a call with someone who works for one of the largest and most famous WordPress agencies. It’s an agency I respect a lot and they do an incredible amount of work to support the WordPress community through various open source efforts, sponsorships etc.

While speaking to this person, I had one of those revelations that seem so obvious when you say them out loud, but it really sat with me afterwards.

» Continue reading “Who is Branch for?”

My vision for Branch

Yesterday I had a conversation with Jonathan Wold about Branch and the WordPress eco system in general. Jonathan asked me a few times what my vision was for Branch. How do I see this playing out? How do I envision the product in the future? The conversation sparked a lot of great questions for me to reflect on. The purpose of this blog post is to try to answer those questions.

» Continue reading “My vision for Branch”

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