Issue with connection FTP wordpress on appengine - wordpress

Question

I am starting with Appengine on GCP and recently had installed Wordpress. But when i tried to install plugins o some themes, i see a window:
Connection Information To perform the requested action, WordPress
needs to access your web server. Please enter your FTP credentials to
proceed. If you do not remember your credentials, you should contact
your web host.
I saw the post with the same issue and I add to the file php.ini:
google_app_engine.disable_readonly_filesystem = 1
and tried to deploy the app again, but doesn't work.
Does someone have wordpress on Appengine in Standard environment running without troubles ?

Answer 1

Best approach is to run Wordpress locally and then deploy to appengine. After lot of trials and failures, I have made these notes for my own reference, and hope these help you too. Here you can run the wordpress site on a separate service on appengine and have multiple services to run different wordpress sites. This way you need only one instance of CloudSQL which is cost effective
On GAE:
Your project ID (myGcpProjectID).
Create SQL Instance if not already exists (instance name: projectwideSQLInstance)
Do not have to create a new instance for wordpress, unless you need security and
don’t mind increased cost.
Create database (name: wordpressDatabase)
Create user and assign a pwd (user: wordpressDBUser ; user: wordpressDBUserPassword)
On your local machine:
Install Composer from https://getcomposer.org/
Run following commands in CloudShell SDK inside your work folder
composer require google/cloud-tools
vendor\bin\wp-gae create
**Answer the series of questions **
Region of SQL instance to be same as from GAE
dir: wordpressforgae (or any other name, this is just your local folder)
project_id: myGcpProjectID
sql_instance: projectwideSQLInstance
db_name: wordpressDatabase
db_user: wordpressDBUser
db_pwd: wordpressDBUserPassword
same user for local? Y
All required wordpress files will be downloaded into the folder wordpressforgae.
Open MySQL Workbench and create a schema with name wordpressDatabase (same as db_name above) on your local server
Download latest version of wordpress and extract contents to a folder named localwp
Install XAMPP (Only Apache server and PHP, Deselect all other options).
Delete the contents inside the htdocs inside XAMPP folder and Copy the contents from localwp (extracted from downloaded Wordpress.zip file).
Run wordpress using a browser with localhost in address line. It will ask you for database details. Answer as below: (Make sure these values match with what you added to CloudSQL instance in the beginning)
Server: yourlocalhost
Database name: wordpressDatabase
User: wordpressDBUser
Password: wordpressDBUserPassword
Necessary fields are added to the database and it will ask you to Enter site details along with site admin name and pwd. Enter site details here. Once everything is done and site is created, check the same by opening “localhost” in another browser, which should show a basic WP website with your site title etc. Now close both browsers.
Now delete the contents of htdocs folder inside xampp
Copy the contents from folder "wordpressforgae" (downloaded with command wp-gae create) and paste inside the htdocs folder of xampp.
Check wp-config.php to ensure these
if ($onGae) {
/** The name of the Cloud SQL database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', wordpressDatabase);
/** Production login info */
define('DB_HOST', ':/cloudsql/ myGcpProjectID:project_region:projectwideSQLInstance');
define('DB_USER', wordpressDBUser);
define('DB_PASSWORD', wordpressDBUserPassword);
} else {
/** The name of the local database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', wordpressDatabase);
/** Local environment MySQL login info */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
define('DB_USER', wordpressDBUser);
define('DB_PASSWORD', wordpressDBUserPassword);
}
Now open the wordpress admin in browser with address localhost/wp-admin. Make all changes including adding/removing themes, uploading images, creating pages or anything else. Check website on another browser as you are making changes.
Uploading site to GAE:
First time, use this command to upload
gcloud app deploy app.yaml cron.yaml
If you like to create the website on a different service than default inside your Appengine add this line to app.yaml
runtime: php72
service: wordpress (can be a different name for each site)
For any subsequent minor changes made to site locally, same can be reflected on GAE by simply exporting the database from local to GAE Cloudinstance using MySQL Workbench.
Only If major changes are made to design, like new theme, add images from local machine etc deploy to GAE using
gcloud app deploy app.yaml cron.yaml
It is better to clear the bucket using this before each deploy (Make sure you have enabled delete rights using IAM - Add Role "Storage Admin" for the email ID you are using on CloudShell login to your GCP account)
gsutil -m rm gs://staging.myGcpProjectID.appspot.com/**
If you have different domains/subdomains you want to direct to each of these sites, you may do the same by adding domains to your appengine and configure dispatch.yaml file to redirect each domain/subdomain to corresponding service on appengine