Simple WordPress on App Engine Starter Project

***Note: This repo is a fork of the Google WordPress for AppEngine starter project that is way too painful for them to maintian. This project ensures you always have the lastest versions of plugins, and makes the entire process of updating and installing plugins for AppEngine painless. From your pals at Redux. ;)

Prerequisites

Install PHP Composer
Install Google's Cloud SDK (gcloud) command prompt utility.
Install the PHP SDK for Google App Engine

$ gcloud components list
# Find the gcloud app PHP Extensions in the list
$ gcloud components install app-engine-php-*

Install MySQL
Sign up for a Google Cloud Platform project, and set up a Cloud SQL instance, as described here, and a Cloud Storage bucket, as described here. You'll want to name your Cloud SQL instance "wordpress" to match the config files provided here. To keep costs down, we suggest signing up for a D0 instance with package billing.
Visit your project in the Google Cloud Console, going to the App Engine section's Application Settings area, and make a note of the Service Account Name for your application, which has an e-mail address (e.g. <PROJECT_ID>@appspot.gserviceaccount.com). Then, visit the Cloud Storage section of your project, select the checkbox next to the bucket you created in step 3, click Bucket Permissions, and add your Service Account Name as a User account that has Writer permission.

Getting Started

Step 1: Clone

Clone this git repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/reduxframework/appengine-wordpress

Step 2: Run composer install

$ php composer install

This will grab all of the plugins/repos defined install them properly. It will also build your public.built directory.

Note, if you are a PC/Windows user, you MUST use the following command, and only edit composer.windows.json to your needs.

$ php composer require composer.win.json

Step 2: Edit public/wp-config.php

Edit public/wp-config.php primarily the DB_HOST declaration for cloud-sql. Also be sure to update the section labeled Authentication Unique Keys and Salts.

Running WordPress locally

First, edit public/wp-config.php to have all the correct database login information.

If you're using MAMP locally on MacOS, there are instructions in public/wp-config.php. Search for MAMP (two places).

On Mac and Windows, the default is to use the PHP binaries bundled with the SDK:

$ APP_ENGINE_SDK_PATH/dev_appserver.py path_to_this_directory

On Linux, or to use your own PHP binaries, use:

$ APP_ENGINE_SDK_PATH/dev_appserver.py --php_executable_path=PHP_CGI_EXECUTABLE_PATH path_to_this_directory

Now, with App Engine running locally, visit http://localhost:8080/wp-admin/install.php in your browser and run the setup process, changing the port number from 8080 if you aren't using the default. Or, to install directly from the local root URL, define WP_SITEURL in your wp-config.php, e.g.:

define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'http://localhost:8080/');

You should be able to log in, and confirm that your app is ready to deploy.

Deploy!

If all looks good, you can upload your application by using this command:

$ APP_ENGINE_SDK_PATH/appcfg.py update APPLICATION_DIRECTORY

Just like you had to do with the local database, you'll need to set up the Cloud SQL instance. The SDK includes a tool for doing just that:

google_sql.py <PROJECT_ID>:wordpress

This launches a browser window that authorizes the google_sql.py tool to connect to your Cloud SQL instance. After clicking Accept, you can return to the command prompt, which has entered into the SQL command tool and is now connected to your instance. Next to sql>, enter this command:

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS wordpress_db;

You should see that it inserted 1 row of data creating the database. You can now type exit -- we're done here.

Now, just like you did when WordPress was running locally, you'll need to run the install script by visiting:

http://<PROJECT_ID>.appspot.com/wp-admin/install.php

Or, to install directly from the root URL, you can define WP_SITEURL in your wp-config.php, e.g.:

define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'http://<YOUR_PROJECT_ID>.appspot.com/');

Activating the plugins, configuring email, and hooking up WordPress to your Cloud Storage

The following steps should be performed on your hosted copy of WordPress on App Engine

Activating the plugins

Now, we just need to activate the plugins that were packaged with your app. Log into the WordPress administration section of your blog at http://<PROJECT_ID>.appspot.com/wp-admin, and visit the Plugins section. Click the links to activate Batcache Manager and Google App Engine for WordPress.

Configuring email and hooking WordPress up to your Cloud Storage

Now visit Settings > App Engine. Enable the App Engine mail service - this will use the App Engine Mail API to send notifications from WordPress. Optionally, enter a valid e-mail address that mail should be sent from (if you leave this blank, the plugin will determine a default address to use). The address of the account you used to the create the Cloud Console project should work.

Stay on this page, because in order to be able to embed images and other multimedia in your WordPress content, you need to enter the name of the Cloud Storage bucket you created when going through all the Prequisites earlier under Upload Settings.

Hit Save Changes to commit everything.

That's all! (PHEW)

Congratulations! You should now have a blog that loads rapidly, caches elegantly, sends email properly, and can support adding images and other media to blog posts! Most importantly, it will take advantage of Google's incredibly powerful infrastructure and scale gracefully to accomodate traffic that is hitting your blog.

Maintaining

You'll want to keep your local copy of the application handy because that's how you install other plugins and update the ones that are packaged with this project. Due to the tight security of the App Engine sandbox, you can't directly write to files in the application area -- they're static. That's also why we hooked your uploads up to Cloud Storage. So, to install plugins, you log into the admin area of your local WordPress instance, install or update any plugins you want there, and redeploy. Then go into the admin area for your hosted WordPress instance to activate the plugins.

Warning

Anything inside public.built/ directory will be erased at every composer update. So I'd suggest updating your code inside the public/ folder and run composer update to deploy the changes.

Updating WordPress, Plugins, and Themes

This is SUPER easy. This is it:

php composer update

Installing a Private Git Repo

Inside your composer.json file, modify the following:

    "repositories": [
        {
            "type":"composer",
            "url":"https://wpackagist.org"
        },
        {
            "type":"package",
            "package": {
                "name": "reduxframework/custom-repo",
                "version":"master",
                "source": {
                    "url": "https://user:pass@github.com/redux-framework/custom-repo.git",
                    "type": "git",
                    "reference": "master"
                }
            }
        }
    ],

reduxframework / appengine-wordpress