I’ve written praise for wp-cli before but it’s a toy that will never get old for me.
I was working on this problem for a friend and I needed to create a test multisite installation. I have a domain I can use aside from my main one so I setup another nginx virtual host, setup the DNS entries and used Let’s Encrypt to obtain legitimate X.509 certificates.
For creating the DB and WordPress config I used CLI commands.
When I get into deep water (and I did) I just rm * -rf in the virtual host’s directory and in mysql drop database leeloodallas; and do it all over again.
The only thing different from other times is the wp core multisite-convert --subdomains command. I already have cookie cutter nginx configs and DNS is fire and forget. Once I had the vhost setup the Let’s Encrypt commands (also scriptable) was trivial.
WP-CLI is cool and scripting this is such a time saver.
Does email work with your WordPress installation? When someone leaves a comment on your blog or your WordPress installation automatically updates to a minor version number such as 4.4 to 4.4.1 do you get that email?
Now that you have done that, on the top right corner of your dashbaord is a “Howdy, User” link. Click that and select Edit My Profile. Scroll down on your profile page and enable the first two options. That’s “Email” and “Time Based One-Time Password (Google Authenticator)”.
I made the Google Authenticator my primary means of logging in. I keep the app on my password protected iPhone, it’s a one-time password (OTP) generator and it doesn’t need access to Google to work. It’s time based after all.
What is two factor authentication (2FA)?
2FA is a means to increase the confidence when you log in that you are in fact who you say you are.
When you log into WordPress, you use an ID and password. The security is in the password and should be along the lines of “gHJjgbtjXa9FLyGkhaHR0o” which I got courtesy of my 1Password app. That password is one factor of authentication. Your password is something that you know.
The second factor is what you have in your possession. In my case it’s my Google Authenticator app on my iPhone.
When I log into my WordPress site I am prompted for my username and password. Once that is successful I am then asked for my authentication code.
Which I get from my app. If that does not work then I click on the backup method and soon get a code via email. I enter that code and I am in, which is why I asked if mail works at the beginning of this post.
Mail needs to work. So does good time keeping.
My multisite installation is on a VPS and I run NTP. I have to because on a VPS the time will drift (on anything really) and if my server’s time is far enough out of sync then my OTP will not work. Or my phone could be dead but I still can access my email.
By configuring the email as a fallback I have another way to get into my installation. That email code is good till it’s used or is replaced and can get you out of a bind.
2FA needs to be built into core
Having 2FA in WordPress as a built-in option moves the security bar farther. It increases the security posture for users and if it is an option, if it’s easy to setup then it will be adopted by users.
Yes, it will take some education for people to use it properly but that is not insurmountable.
In the past, users would install WordPress and forget to maintain them. The other day I came across a 3.5.2 installation. That was released in July 2013. In Internet years that’s ancient and there are several known exploits out there. The 3.5.x code isn’t maintained.
As of version 3.7 minor release updates are turned on automatically by default. If you installed 3.7 and did not do anything else then as of today you are or will be running 3.7.12 shortly. Major version upgrades are not automatic so 3.7.x will not update to 3.8 or even to the current 4.4.1. The major versions need to be updated by the user initiating that upgrade, although some forward thinking hosts will do it for you anyway.
Automatic updates are a result of the developers wanting the environment to become more secure. Unpatched WordPress installations were the cause of compromised sites that sent spam, spread spammy links and made the Internet neighborhood a worse place to be.
It also gave WordPress an unjustifiable reputation for being insecure because users did not maintain their code.
Having 2FA is similar to enabling TLS on your WordPress installation. If your server supports HTTPS just update your Site URL and WordPress Address, perform a little search and replace for the old http:// references to their TLS versions and you are done. More and more sites are defaulting to https because it’s easy.
2FA is like that, it’s a step in the direction of users taking their security into their own hands. It’s educational too, meaning that once it’s setup and working you’ve learned something new.
What about the Support Team’s concerns?
Mika Epstein, myself and others expressed reservations not about having 2FA built into WordPress. We like this idea. Our concerns were along the lines of “How can we walk the user through disabling 2FA if they bork it badly?”
The idea we expressed was that this should be enabled by editing the wp-config.php file by hand, just as you have to do when you enable multisite. If you can do that successfully then you are technical enough for 2FA. The words I used were “you need to be this tall to enable this feature”.
I don’t think that anymore. If someone’s email is working then they can get back into their installation with the emailed access code.
Manual password resets is difficult for regular users. If they can enable 2FA and have a not too difficult way to disable it then any reservations I’ve had are gone. I know this is being worked on and I would really like to see this properly put into WordPress 4.5.
It’s something that can make the Internet neighborhood a more secure place to be.
I had some time and did a git pull on the Let’s Encrypt github page. This is a project that makes it easy to install and maintain free X.509 certificates for web servers. The certificates are in PEM format and can be easily used for any server app but usually it’s just for HTTPS on web servers.
Requesting your own certs
The first time I ran the ./letsencrypt-auto command it used apt-get to download its dependencies. The integration with Ubuntu is nice and works well. A few minutes later of some prodding and poking, meaning I read the Let’s Encrypt User Guide, I gave it a shot.
On my VPS I selected blog.epyon-1.com and ran the following command as root.
The site blog.epyon-1.com is on my WordPress network so the directory is the same. The end result of that was to politely create and place these symlinked files.
Which is the same command with just --renew added to it. Easy. If you don’t renew the CA will send you a reminder at the email you specified via the “-m not@my-email.btw” command line argument.
I’m not directing the output to /dev/null because if that cronjob works or not I want to see that output. If the cronjob fails then I can always run the command by hand.
Will I switch all my domains to Let’s Encrypt?
Why not? The project is currently in a public beta and the Let’s Encrypt tools will change and continue to be developed. But for the next 90 days the certificate I obtained will work fine. Even better if they automatically renew.
What I am looking for is a reasonable expectation of privacy between my web server and my visitors. I do not use TLS for authentication and the Let’s Encrypt certificates work fine.
If I had an online store then I might consider getting an Extended Validation Certificate but that would be only to reassure visitors when they are making a purchase. EV certs are not cheap. Let’s Encrypt is free so it’s not a hard decision for me to make.
This helps protect the traffic from casual snoopers between my server and your browser. It’s not a magic bullet for security but the wide spread adoption of encryption will help promote privacy.
I thought I broke my oEmbed discovery links but I had a more fundamental problem. I had broken fancy permalinks on my nginx configuration for a while and didn’t realize it.
I revisited the Nginx Codex page and did a stare and compare of my configuration and the examples there. I am sure I read that page in the past and my mistake was the “try_files” line.
See the “?$args” part? With that in place the non-post URLs work. The permalinks worked fine but things that were not to a post or page didn’t. Due to my fancy permalink settings my oEmbed discovery links had this format.
https://blog.dembowski.net/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=urlencoded-data-here and that wasn’t being handled by my nginx configuration.
My plugin worked because I was replacing the fancy URLs with the regular non-fancy “?rest_route” version which nginx passed along to my WordPress installation just fine.
I could not get it to work for me. No way, no how. The json and XML discovery links were there in the post HTML but those links came back with “What? What? No. Go away, you’re bothering kid.”
It should have come back with a valid output and it did. It was a result, just not a functioning one.
Nice huh? All neat in an iframe and easily embeddable. The output is customizable too and I plan to do that on my photo blog.
The oEmbed discovery links should just work but on my installations it doesn’t. I tried Apache2, nginx, clean installation with zero plugins and the Twenty Fifteen theme. Different servers too. I always got the wrong output and could not get oEmbed working.
During my troubleshooting I found a different URL that worked consistently for me. It’s the same information but with a filter I replaced the default output with one that worked for me.
Here’s the plugin code I used. The oembed_discovery_links is filterable (filters are cool) and I toss out the old links and replace them with my own.
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This works for me but I do not like this solution.
The problem I have is that the normal links are not being replied to correctly via my WordPress installation. I don’t know why the default discovery links are not working. It bothers me, it really does. 😉
I’m convinced that there is something I’m doing wrong in my setup. Once I figure it out I’ll I can remove this plugin and I’ll post what I was missing.
I’m more of a Network Monkey, but whenever I can provision something just using an ssh session I smile. Many hosts use WP-CLI already and I’ve installed it on my VPS too.
This morning I wrote up a small script to go to my test vhost directory and did the following.
Install a blank WordPress site
Update some settings
Fix my user display name
Make sure the plugins and themes are up to date (Akismet needed an update)
Delete the default post and page
Install, activate and configure the Wapuuvatar plugin
Install and activate the Baskerville theme
Imported the Theme Unit Test data
Cleaned up after the import
Used search and replace to make all my http URLs into https
All this was performed without using a mouse or web GUI. (Okay, I checked the avatar setting via /options.php, but I didn’t have to.)
Here’s the script with sensitive details changed.
#!/bin/bash
cd /my/notsecret/www/vhosts/bang.dn7.me
# Setup a new WordPress installation
wp core download
wp core config --dbname=tothemoon \
--dbuser=testuser \
--dbpass=3c962761afbf9ab40a2e75346809c8cf
wp core install --admin_user=jan \
--admin_password=Rea11y*ot7y^assWiRd \
--admin_email=example@example.com \
--url=bang.dn7.me \
--title="Bang! Boom! Pow!"
# Update some options and my account info
wp option update blogdescription \
"What could possibly go wrong?"
wp option update comment_moderation 1
wp option update comments_notify 0
wp option update moderation_notify 0
wp option update comment_whitelist 0
wp user update 1 --first_name="Jan" \
--last_name="Dembowski" \
--display_name="Jan Dembowski"
# Make sure plugins and themes are all up to date
wp plugin update --all
wp theme update --all
# Clean up the default post and page
wp post delete 1 --force
wp post delete 2 --force
# Wapuuvatar is cool. Install, activate
# and set to the default avatar
wp plugin install wapuuvatar --activate
wp option update avatar_default dwapuuvatar
# Let's play with the Baskerville theme
wp theme install baskerville --activate
# Now to import the theme unit test data
wp plugin install wordpress-importer --activate
curl -O https://wpcom-themes.svn.automattic.com/demo/theme-unit-test-data.xml
wp import theme-unit-test-data.xml --authors=create
# Clean up in aisle seven
wp plugin deactivate wordpress-importer
wp plugin delete wordpress-importer
rm theme-unit-test-data.xml
# My test site is also TLS so I'll fix
# all the things to point to the encrypted URL
wp search-replace http://bang.dn7.me https://bang.dn7.me
# All done
I previously dropped the test installation’s database and created a new empty one. A quick “rm -rf *” (which wise people never do) in the right vhost directory and I ran “bash install-bang.sh”.
It works like a charm. Smart web hosts can and do tie WP-CLI into their provisioning setup. I happened to setup my vhost with TLS and mysql in advance but with a little backend work this can be easily automated.
If you have a test server to play with then give WP-CLI a try. You’ll get a better understanding of both WordPress and the command line.
Friday afternoon I called the house and got my then 13 year old son. He turned 14 a few days later.
Dad, the WiFi sucks. I'm trying to download an update to War Thunder and it's taking almost an hour.
He was right, the WiFi adapter on his PC is garbage. The access point is in the same room less than 10 feet away. There's no reason for wireless to suck.
I told him that I'll get an Ethernet cable and hardwire him into the FIOS router. That will give him all the bandwidth he could ever use. I didn't think much about it after that till I got home.
He really wanted that update to War Thunder.
He gave it some thought and enabled tethering on his iPhone. Via WiFi he connected his PC to the iPhone and began to download the update. In less than 2 hours he ate almost 3 GB out of my monthly 10 GB allotment.
This did not make Lily and I very happy. She got a text message saying we'd crossed 75% of usage. She asked him and he suddenly remembered what he'd done and quietly disabled tethering without 'fessing up. Lily pulled up a pie chart of the usage and his phone was right behind mine.
I got home and it took me 0.0035 seconds to figure out what he did. I was angry and let him know that he was being selfish. He should have told his mother what he'd done. And yet… I like how he figured out another way to connect to the Internet. He had a problem and quickly came up with an alternative to fix it.
He lost cellular data for the week and may lose it for the rest of December. I also deleted his games and YouTube app from his phone; enough already. But I'm glad he thinks to solve problems and I can't be mad at him for that. Later on I told him I like that part of what he did.
Last year I was fortunate to be invited to the 2014 WordPress Community Summit and this year in Philadelphia I’m going again. Tomorrow morning Lily and I will wake up around 4 AM. She’ll drive me to the train station where I’ll take a 5 AM train to Penn Station. From there it’s an Amtrak ride to Philadelphia.
I’ll be a little late to the event. 😉 It can’t be avoided, I had too much going on at work to be there the night before. The 4 AM is rough on Lily but I’m often awake at that time waiting for 5:30 to get up. She’s much more sensible than I am and I wouldn’t be going but for her support and tolerating my hobbies.
I’m excited and it’s interesting to me that I explain why.
Everyday I go to work and with a great team of people and I deal with conflict. Projects that are in-flight, new commitments are made, deadlines are met or extended or flat-out missed (which is not good). Sometimes work is a disappointment and there’s always someone that’s upset or really pissed off. Sometimes I unintentionally let people down.
“Work sucks” or so the saying goes. It’s a challenge and it’s a constant test and conflict. How will I deal with this problem? Will someone or something piss me off and what drama will happen today?
I don’t think it sucks at all.
I’m one of the people in the middle of that organized chaos. When the alarm bell rings and it’s on me to figure it out and make it all work, I am one of the best firefighters there is. I’ll find the problem, I’ll get to the solution, I’ll have a dozen eyes on me all talking at the same time. I’ll have the support of my boss and co-workers. I won’t have any fear or hesitation. I’ll stand there on the call and get the job done. And I’ll do it with my characteristic and occasionally inappropriate sense of humor.
It’s not really different from a lot of jobs. My participation in the WordPress community is nothing like this at all.
Tomorrow I’ll be surrounded by developers, support people, designers and people I respect and admire and, most importantly, a number of friends. This will be my fourth WordCamp. I’ll be having great fun.
I will, once again, be intimidated. That’s not a bad thing.
You see, for me providing support for WordPress started out as therapy. Answering a topic in the forums and helping someone is fun and addictive. I occasionally help people out of a hole and that’s always cool.
Later on getting more involved meant helping people as well going behind the bar and moderating the forums. Cleaning out the spam queue, closing an occasional run away topic, stuff like that. I’m big on routines and I’m used to looking at the forums before the coffee set in.
My WordPress involvement went from being a form of therapy to using that involvement to becoming better at my job.
Collaborating with people in person and online improves me as a professional. The reason I’m intimidated is that, while I don’t think that my involvement is bad, I’m sure that I can improve. Or perhaps someone else can do it better than I do.
I’m comfortable with my intimidation. I don’t always have to be the one putting out the fires and I can learn more when I don’t have all the answers.
I’ll have a great time. I can’t wait to see the gang in person.
