Static site generation

[adamziel]

Supports rendering the documentation site as a set of static HTML, JS, CSS, etc files.

How does it work?

1. The JavaScript crawler requests /logout/ to, well, log out.
2. The /sitemap/ endpoint returns a list of all Posts with post_type=page and their URLs
3. A JavaScript crawler requests each of those pages and writes the rendered HTML to the out directory
4. All full-qualified site URLs are replaced with an absolute path
5. The JavaScript crawler sends a request to /zip-wp-files/ to create wp.zip with wp-includes and wp-content inside (without PHP files)
6. The JavaScript crawler unzips wp.zip in the out directory, shipping the missing static assets

Yeah, it's weird process – that's because of wp-now's limitations.

wp-now workarounds

I had to use a few workarounds that would be better addressed in wp-now:

• wp-now only runs a single PHP process which means PHP cannot issue a HTTP request to itself.
• wp-now enforces a mode it deems the most appropriate and doesn't allow me to explicitly say --mode=server. However, I would just like to use it as a plain PHP server here.
• wp-now does not support explicitly mounting specific directories. I needed to copy wp-content and wp-includes to ../out and couldn't do it because ../out isn't available in VFS. I ended up generating a zip file and unzip it with JavaScript. wp-now could either mount the entire host filesystem and expose all the directories or support a --mount=/host/path:/vfs/path flag.
• wp-now doesn't support custom mu-plugins so I had to add a writeFile step to my Blueprint.
• wp-now in wp-content mode expects a theme to be in place and won't apply the default WordPress theme. I had to use the installTheme step to install twentytwentyfour. The assumption seems to be that my wp-content directory is complete and contains all it needs, but I'm shipping just a subset of the files in this repo. Instead of mounting wp-content, wp-now could perhaps mount specific plugins and directories found inside wp-content.
• wp-now forcefully logs the user in so I had to add a /logout/ endpoint and request it before starting the static site generation process.
• wp-now doesn't kill its child processes so I had to include ps aux | grep wp-now | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9 in the start-site.sh bash script.
• wp-now creates some new files (e.g. Blueprint-installed theme) in my filessytem so I have to run git stash -u every time a site is launched. I'd either create ALL the files in the filesystem, including sqlite-database-integration, OR no files at all and keep all the changes in VFS.
• wp-now does not activate plugins or themes via activatePlugin and activateTheme step.
• Occasionally wp-now stops responding to requests and just hangs. There are no CLI errors visible.

These would all make good issues

cc @sejas @wojtekn