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[Meng]

Hi there,

First of all: theoretical question, no server or installation involved, just asking about the what-if’s…

I’m doing a bit of exploring work on running my WP installs on GCP’s App Engine to reduce costs and improve scale-ability and I noticed a few caveats in place. Because of the way App Engine spins up ephemeral instances to satisfy increasing demand, it cannot permit your app (i.e. WordPress) to write to the local filesystem, because those instances disappear as fast as they are called into action. The DB runs separately and is perfectly fine (and writeable). So you run a local copy of your site on your machine, where you can execute file-writing operations (like install the plugins and themes), and redeploy to the cloud afterwards.

Okay, so far so good on a blank WP install. Now comes the questions:

As a result, I’m worried about a the theme and plugins I like to run, amongst which most importantly: X theme and Cornerstone plugin. Does the theme, after installation, still require to write to the filesystem? Does the Cornerstone plugin require this, or do any of the bundled extensions/plugins? So I’m wondering, any ideas on how to run my favorite ThemeCo theme and plugins, when WP can’t write any files?

Please let me know. Very curious and interested to start testing with GCP’s App Engine. Supposedly it’s the bees knees of cloud hosting and AWS ain’t got nothing on them (except much more customers, hahahahaha).

[Rupok]

Hi there,

Thanks for writing in! Usually Cornerstone store data directly to DB and won’t need to write file. But I think it won’t be a good idea to run WordPress somewhere where file write permission is disabled. Lot of plugins will need to write on some file. For example, if you use any security or caching plugin, it will write configuration into wp-config.php and .htaccess etc. So you will face issue for those.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

[Meng]

Thanks Rupok. Since it’s going to be experimental, that’s why I’m asking exactly whether there are any files written. I’m contacting support for each plugin I plan to use for this very purpose.

1. Could you please confirm specifically whether X or Cornerstone write to files?

[Rupok]

Hi there,

Thanks for updating. I can’t say specifically that it won’t. Say, you are using the image element or another element that will upload an image. So it must be stored to your upload folder that needs write permission. There are lot of elements that also “might” need to write files/folders.

Cheers!

[Meng]

Hi Rupok,

My apologies, yes, I forgot to mention that part. There’s a GAE4WP plugin that modifies core WP processes so user uploads are stored in a Storage Bucket, so uploads are no the issue. They are placed in the bucket and retrieved accordingly because the plugin modifies the WP core to move the user uploads folder and all its references in the DB to the Storage Bucket’s URI. Basically your entire media library lives outside the WP application folder, then.

Will that affect X? The question then is, does Cornerstone or the X Customizer use its own custom media library scripts or does it hook into standard WP functionalities? If the latter, no problem (the other plugin has modified that already), but in the first case, I’d love to hear from you guys how it works (so I might be able to modify it a bit).

It’s really about whether themes and/or plugins incorporate ‘writing to files’ as part of their process (i.e. to write htaccess, store configuration options, or to modify the WP core). Is that a bit more specied for you to answer?

[Rue Nel]

Hello There,

Thanks for the updates! To sum up and have a brief answer to your question. If WordPress will run smoothly in GCP’s App Engine then you will have no problem having X and Cornerstone with it. Here at Themeco, we always make use and abide whatever WordPress standards so that X and Cornerstone will run where ever as long as WordPress could run smoothly.

X and Cornerstone doesn’t write any separate files. It always make use of the media library and that all data is being saved in the database as WordPress does.

Hope this explains it briefly.

[Meng]

Exquisite. Thanks!

[Joao]

Let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks

Joao

[Author]

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