30.09.22

WordPress development tricks

Expanding on Moving a WordPress instance by hand, here’s my list of hacks and tricks necessary for managing local WordPress instances.

Send PHP development server (‘wp server’) logs to a separate file

  1. In php-cli’s php.ini (should be somewhere under /etc/php), set:
    log_errors = On
    error_log = /var/log/php_errors.log
  2. sudo chmod 777 /var/log/php_errors.log (yeah, whatever)

Catch emails

  1. Install mailcatcher: gem install mailcatcher (requires rubygems package to be installed)
  2. In php-cli’s php.ini, set sendmail_path = /usr/bin/env catchmail
  3. At the very bottom of wp-config.php, below where it loads wp-settings.php, put: 
if (defined('WP_CLI')) {
    WP_CLI::add_wp_hook('wp_mail_from', function () {
        return '[email protected]';
    });
} else {
    add_filter('wp_mail_from', function () {
        return '[email protected]';
    });
}

(otherwise WordPress will fail to send emails, saying “Invalid address: (From): wordpress@localhost”)

Use more workers for the PHP development server

This may make things faster, but it may also slow things down to a crawl. Give it a shot.

Simply append PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=N before the wp server command, like so:

PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=50 wp server

Kill and restart a hanging PHP development server

If you see pages infinitely loading, just CTRL-C the development server and kill all its workers before trying to restart it by doing:

pkill -f 8080      # <-- Replace '8080' with whatever port you used

Disable Dark Reader

Both in Firefox and Chrome, something in the browser plugin Dark Reader’s logic triggers multiple background loads of the index, which really slows things down when using PHP’s development server.

Fix uploads not working even though file permissions are OK

This could be caused by the upload_path setting in the wp_options table. To fix, clear the field:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'upload_path';

Tags: , | Posted in Uncategorized
15.02.22

Moving a WordPress instance by hand

Over the years I’ve migrated a lot of WordPress sites. Although there are plugins that can take care of it, I have yet to find a more efficient way than just doing it by hand. The following is my recipe for migrating WordPress instances.

In the example we move a site to our local development environment.

Prerequisites

  • Shell (usually SSH) access to the server that runs the WordPress instance
  • PHP CLI (sudo apt install php-cli)
  • WP-CLI

Exporting the database

The quickest way is to use wp-cli:

cd public_html
wp db dump example.com.sql

If that doesn’t work, here’s the manual way:

cd public_html
# Find database credentials
grep DB_ wp-config.php
# Create a database dump
mysqldump somedb -u someuser -p'somepassword' > example.com.sql

Archiving the website

Make a tarball of the site’s files:

tar czf example.com.tgz public_html

If it’s only for testing and you’re in a hurry, exclude the WP Uploads directory:

tar czf example.com.tgz --exclude=**/wp-content/uploads/* public_html

Now copy the tarball over to your machine.

Setting up local environment

  1. Unpack the WordPress instance:
    tar xzf example.com.tgz
  2. Update database credentials in wp-config.php
    For local development, I usually just take user ‘root’ with an empty password (the Gods of Security frown upon me)
  3. Create and import the database, e.g.:
    sudo mysqladmin create example_com
    cd public_html
    wp db cli < example.com.sql
  4. To not need HTTPS locally:
    a. Remove any line containing “FORCE_SSL_ADMIN” from wp-config.php
    b. Remove or rename (= deactivate) any plugin (from wp-content/plugins) that forces ssl, for instance ‘really-simple-ssl’
  5. Replace your WordPress base URL using wp-cli:
    wp search-replace https://example.com http://localhost:8080
  6. Run the local development server:
    wp server --port=8080

You should now be able to access the WordPress site by visiting http://localhost:8080 !

Optional, but handy

Create an admin user for yourself:
wp user create myadmin [email protected] --role=administrator --user_pass=admin

Troubleshooting

If connecting to the database fails, it could be that an empty password is not accepted. As using root with an empty password is a bit of a hack, here’s another hack to make it work for newer versions of MySQL/MariaDB. Obtain a root MySQL shell and execute:

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Further (necessary) tweaking

See WordPress development tricks

Tags: , | Posted in Uncategorized