I just discovered static sites and I’m very excited!
I’m developing on my local machine using LocalWP.
And I have downloaded the source code and composed WP zip files of both WP2Static and the WP2Static GCS Deployment Add-on.
I then created a Google Cloud Storage bucket - but I’m not sure which of those configuration settings to use inside the WP2Static GCS Deployment Add-on settings…
The “Bucket Name” is easy enough, but I can’t find anything in Google Console for “Key File Path” or the “Path prefix in bucket”.
Here is a screenshot of the Google Console Bucket configurations (I greyed out some details for privacy). Can those detais be found here but under a different name? Or maybe they’re somewhere else?
I haven’t used it for any live sites–I just made it because someone needed it. I don’t use GCP for anything due to their forced migration policy.
“Key File Path” should be the path to file containing GCP credentials, in whatever format GCP uses for that purpose. If you’re running the server on GCP, you may be able to leave it blank and have the credentials picked up automatically.
“Path prefix in bucket” can be blank. It’s only needed if you want to assign the files to a subdirectory within the bucket.
Thanks that might be enough for me to figure out on my end.
But what is this migration policy you speak of? I just Googled the topic but it doesn’t give me much to go on, unfortunately. Is it something I should be aware of?
There’s a lot of profanity in Steve Yegge’s article, but it’s a pretty good summary from someone with quite a bit of experience as a Senior Staff Engineer at Google. Here’s a clean excerpt:
I sometimes get similar letters from the Google Cloud Platform. They look like this:
Dear Google Cloud Platform User, We are writing to remind you that we are sunsetting [Important Service you are using] as of August 2020, after which you will not be able to perform any updates or upgrades on your instances. We encourage you to upgrade to the latest version, which is in Beta, has no documentation, no migration path, and which we have kindly deprecated in advance for you. We are committed to ensuring that all developers of Google Cloud Platform are minimally disrupted by this change.
They claim they’re doing a little better now, but my understanding is that they still don’t come anywhere near AWS’s level of stability (admittedly a very high bar indeed). What’s more, there have been widely-reported rumors that Google plans to kill off GCP if it wasn’t successful enough, and as far as I know Google has not seen fit to address these concerns or publicly commit to keeping GCP around for even three more years.
I did look into using GCP at one point, but found that the specific feature I wanted had been decommissioned with apparently no direct replacement. They used to have a pretty nice image service that could do smart resizes, etc. on images stored in their object storage. The AWS version of that solution was a lot more DIY, but it’s never broken and it still exists.
