Running multiple blueprints

[swissspidy]

For my project it would be useful to be able to run multiple blueprints:

• One that I control for setting up the bare environment (some must-use plugins, setting some options, etc.)
• One that I don't control, which is the blueprint provided by the developer (e.g. one from the plugin directory live preview)

Using mounts I can partially address (1), but I'd also need to run some CLI commands still.

I thought I could do npx @wp-playground/cli server to start the server and then do npx @wp-playground/cli run-blueprint in another tab, but then I get an error because the port is already in use. Plus, I just realized it does same thing just with exiting the process instead of keeping the server running.

Then I tried running the command twice with different blueprints:

npx @wp-playground/cli run-blueprint my-blueprint.json 
npx @wp-playground/cli run-blueprint remote-blueprint.json 

But of course that spawns two separate ephemeral sites instead of running against the same site.

My next try would be to somehow merge two blueprints (especially the steps), but that seems error prone because I don't know the shape of the second blueprint and maybe that could cause issues because of unexpected order of steps or conflicting steps.

[swissspidy]

Using this for now and it seems to work:

jq -s 'map(to_entries)|flatten|group_by(.key)|map({(.[0].key):map(.value)|add})|add' my-blueprint.json remote-blueprint.json

[adamziel]

@swissspidy so if I understand correctly, you would like to:

1. Set up a WordPress site with a Blueprint
2. Run another Blueprint against that same WordPress site

...like in multi-stage Docker builds?

If so, you should be able to do it with:

npx @wp-playground/cli@latest run-blueprint --blueprint=my-blueprint.json --mount-before-install="./my-wp-dir:/wordpress"
npx @wp-playground/cli@latest run-blueprint --blueprint=remote-blueprint.json --mount-before-install="./my-wp-dir:/wordpress"

This will use your local directory as the base site without forcefully installing WordPress in VFS and using that.

Now, there's an error the first time you run it:

Error: Could not remove directory "/tmp/unzipped-wordpress/xmlrpc.php": Not a directory or a symbolic link to a directory.

Just re-run the command and it will work. I'm cooking a fix for that error here: #1770

As a side note, I would love to support that natively in the Playground webapp. It should be fairly easy with the upcoming first-class support for stored sites. We could accept multiple Blueprints via the Query API or, alternatively, consider a run-blueprint step.

It related to Merging Blueprints, except merging would run two Blueprints at once and with sequential runs we could run the first Blueprint, wait a month, and run a second one. This seems similar to Docker base images.

Perhaps the "multistage build" strategy could become the first official way of "merging Blueprints". It's not quite merging, sure, but perhaps merging was the wrong idea all along. Multistage seems clean, doesn't require any special resolution rules, and conveniently it gives us multistage builds for free. And if it's ever not enough, then we can discuss where it falls short and how to address that. Ha! Thank you @swissspidy! This is why I really like letting some of these architectural problems simmer for a long time.

[swissspidy]

OK so I've tried this now at swissspidy/wp-performance-action#173 and it doesn't seem to work.

The second blueprint completely overrides everything from the first one.

Context: I am running this in that PR's branch, within the env folder.

My local blueprint (setup.json): https://github.com/swissspidy/wp-performance-action/blob/e49c63d3885ff264a0d23611fe3d3cedf3022192/env/blueprints/setup.json

The remote blueprint (blueprint-complex.json): https://github.com/swissspidy/wp-performance-action/blob/e49c63d3885ff264a0d23611fe3d3cedf3022192/tests/blueprint-complex.json

Plugin I need to mount: https://github.com/swissspidy/wp-performance-action/tree/e49c63d3885ff264a0d23611fe3d3cedf3022192/tests/dummy-plugin

# Seems to work fine, it says demo content was imported and twentytwentyone theme activate
./node_modules/@wp-playground/cli/wp-playground.js run-blueprint --blueprint=./blueprints/setup.json --mount-before-install="./wp:/wordpress"

# Seems to work fine as well, the plugin is mounted to `wp-content/plugins`, and all the plugins are activated
./node_modules/@wp-playground/cli/wp-playground.js run-blueprint --blueprint=../tests/blueprint-complex.json --mount-before-install="./wp:/wordpress" --mount=../tests/dummy-plugin:/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/dummy-plugin

# None of the plugins are activated, there is no demo content, twentytwentyfour is active
./node_modules/@wp-playground/cli/wp-playground.js server --mount-before-install="./wp:/wordpress" --mount=../tests/dummy-plugin:/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/dummy-plugin

Then I try this, as server is just like run-blueprint without exiting:

# Seems to work fine, it says demo content was imported and twentytwentyone theme activate
./node_modules/@wp-playground/cli/wp-playground.js run-blueprint --blueprint=./blueprints/setup.json --mount-before-install="./wp:/wordpress"

# The plugin is mounted to `wp-content/plugins` and all the plugins are activated, but there is no demo content, twentytwentyfour is active
./node_modules/@wp-playground/cli/wp-playground.js server --blueprint=../tests/blueprint-complex.json --mount-before-install="./wp:/wordpress" --mount=../tests/dummy-plugin:/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/dummy-plugin

[adamziel]

To close the loop here, I've opened a new issue to track this #1631

[swissspidy]

@adamziel Wrong link? 1631 is this discussion here.