Need to exclude specific dirs when wrapping a site up to push to production, specifically bower_components and node_modules. Run this command from the site root of your WP install.

tar --exclude='wp-content/themes/THEME_NAME/bower_components' --exclude='wp-content/themes/THEME_NAME/node_modules' -zcvf SITE_NAME.tar.gz *.php wp-admin/ wp-content/ wp-includes/

NOTE: leave trailing ‘/’ off the path of dirs to exclude as tar doesn’t like it.

Published on November 3, 2017