Migrating site from stage to production server without particular dev. plugins?

Question

I am thinking of some ways to exclude few development/staging related plugins(e.g P3, Query Monitor) from an automatic migration process to production server. For migration I use managewp.com. In the setup process they have facility to exclude particular folders from migration/backup/clone, so I thought perhaps I can stick in there corresponding directory paths of undesired plugins. But I am not sure such harsh removing way of plugins is the correct way. I know WP deactivates plugin in database if it's gone from radar and shows notification about it. But I haven't found any information on does WP clean up after that harshly removed plugins?

Also mu-plugins directory buzzing in my head as other solution ... But never used it. though it looks like it doesn't have manual deactivation feature. So perhaps it works in the way I need?

Or I have approached this process from wrong side?

Thank you for your input in advance

Answer 1

Well, I will try to answer my question myself.

From what I've learnt there is no easy and gentle ways to exclude plugins on the fly. Each plugin,if you lucky, has uninstall.php witch executed upon when you click button "delete". So if you harshly remove plugin it will leave traces in databases. Even if you just only deactivated plugin, plugins data in database still persists. When you just manually removed a plugin from server, Wordpress will just only deactivate it, but not remove any leftover data.

So for now only option is to manually remove plugins, and only after that do execute migration script(in my case it's managewp). Perhaps in some future hopefully ManageWp will add this functionality. Which I guess can be achieved..