ILE International

ILE International trains and examines. Language courses and corporate audits on one side. On the other, preparation and registration for the certificates people need to emigrate, enrol or be hired — TCF, DELF, IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, SIELE, Evalang, Linguaskill. Sessions are sold from the site, in English, French and Spanish, some funded through the French CPF scheme, so the paperwork matters as much as the teaching.

The business ran on a single Paris VPS. No git, no build, no staging: files were copied up by hand, and the only record of what was deployed was the server itself. Inside the WordPress site sat a PHP back office written years earlier — invoices, calendar, members, payments — talking to MySQL directly, sending mail through PHPMailer, and running the administration the institute could not stop using for a week while someone rewrote it.

So it was not rewritten. WordPress moved onto Bedrock with every dependency declared and WooCommerce taking the payments. The legacy application came along intact, as part of the same repository. The whole thing became one Docker image — Caddy, PHP-FPM, Redis for object cache, MariaDB — deployed onto Docker Swarm behind Cloudflare. What used to be an afternoon of copying files is now a branch, a staging URL and a deploy.

The e-learning side, ile-online.com, is a LearnDash platform held to the same standard: licensed plugins pinned as versioned Composer packages from our own registry instead of uploaded zip files, with Sentry watching for what breaks. The test collator is a third piece — quiz software from the early 2010s, kept working on PHP 8 and put in a container, because results still land in it every week.

Ongoing since 2020. Most of the value here is invisible from the front page. The site looks much as it did, and that is the point.