Blog

You might decrease the complexity of a monolithic application (I’m not actually sure that’s even a valid statement, that a “monolith application” is “complex”) but you conversely increase the complexity by adding in all the network hops, latency, asynchronicity, and having to debug strange timeout errors.

It doesn’t matter what you call your architecture, you’re still going to encounter an equal number of problems to think about, debug and solve.

[This is a post for self-reference]

Up front I’m going to say I got exactly the help I need from here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-increase-the-maximum-file-upload-size-in-wordpress/.
The author of that post deserves all my credit.

I’m creating this post to summarise it in my own words and to give it a little educational context.

---

When allowing file uploads on a website there are 3 big things you need to think about:

• The size of each file.
• The total size of all files in an upload.
• The time it takes to process the upload.

Actually, there are a couple of things to consider that are worthy of mention but I won’t cover in this post:

• Asynchronous uploads (AJAX as we used to call them) can change the figure of an upload, because instead of uploading multiple files at one, you upload one file at a time (even if they are in parallel) so the “total size of all files” number will be different.
• Tell users about the limits they face before they upload. Also, when uploading images a bit of guidance around things like “27MB images are a stupid side for most sites because 27MB isn’t going to be better than 7MB, and the site will trim the size down to a couple of hundred KB at most anyway.”
• Trap, log and respond to any errors. This is on my mind because WordPress/PHP seems to like gobbling errors and not telling anyone about it (I’m in the process of hunting down how to handle this and will be a topic of another post).

 

There are 3 main ways in PHP to affect file upload sizes and times:

• @set_init() in a PHP script itself.
• php.ini file
• .hataccess file.

Be aware, as a PHP/Linux novice I reckon there are other defaults and hierarchies that come into play.
This article is spawned by a situation where I was changing php.ini without realising .htaccess had a value overriding it.

 

How do you implement these values?

This is where I rip from the wpbeginner site I mentioned above for quick reference:

1. PHP script file (e.g. functions.php in WordPress themes)

@ini_set( 'upload_max_size' , '64M' );
@ini_set( 'post_max_size', '64M');
@ini_set( 'max_execution_time', '300' );

(I haven’t tried this approach yet, but I have used @ini_set() in other instances (e.g. ‘memory_limit’) and it’s worked well.

2. php.ini

upload_max_filesize = 64M
post_max_size = 64M
max_execution_time = 300

I’ve used this approach in development and it did the trick.

3 .htaccess

php_value upload_max_filesize 64M
php_value post_max_size 64M
php_value max_execution_time 300

Before writing this post I had to fix a production issue and after trying php.ini I got lucky and discovered .htaccess was where the value was coming from.
So the moral: .htaccess overrides php.ini.

Also, I did not need to restart apache for this change to take affect.

 

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t actually read in-depth how all this works. I’m a typical developer who expects other people’s shit to work, and when it doesn’t I’m usually in the middle of my own concerns so it’s a case of “search and scan by keyword until someone else’s solution works for me”.
Such is this age of software development.

 

Need to know what your current settings are?

It’s helpful in debugging and verification to know what your actual PHP settings are so you know what your starting point is (and  you have a number to search your files for).

A good way is to call phpinfo();.

For example, create a file in your site (I call mine info.php) and add the following PHP code:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

You should see something like the following when you run it. This screenshot shows some output from the section titled “Core”, and the 3 columns are (from left to right): “Directive”, “Local Value” and “Master Value”. I can say from experience the “Local Value” is the one that matters.

Background

One of the components in a web application solution we’re developing uses xmlrpc_encode_request() in PHP.

It was executing fine in most of our systems systems – development and multiple test servers – but while trying to run it for the first time in my development environment I received the following error:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function xmlrpc_encode_request()

So off to Google I go and, find a few answers, have a couple of mis-starts, then finally get it working.

 

Solution

The solution was very simple.

1. Install the xmlrpc extension.

   sudo apt-get install php-xmlrpc

2. Restart Apache web server

   sudo service apache2 restart

As a sanity check, create a PHP file (e.g. info.php) and add the following:

<?php
echo 'XMLRPC is ', extension_loaded('xmlrpc') ? 'loaded' : 'not loaded';
?>

When you run the file it you should see “XMLRPC is loaded” if all is good.

If you’re still having trouble, try updating your php.ini file to include:

extension=xmlrpc.so;

and/or

extension=php_xmlrpc.so;

Unfortunately, if you still have trouble then I apologise and suggest hitting Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo/StackOverflow again and playing around with search terms that meet your specific Linux/OS/PHP versions.

 

More Background

I started with a search for “Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function xmlrpc_encode_request” then “lamp Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function xmlrpc_encode_request”, and had these results:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24473366/issue-with-wordpress-xmlrpc
• https://www.khattam.info/solved-fatal-error-call-to-undefined-function-xmlrpc_encode_request-in-pathtoaphpfile-on-line-x-2010-09-25.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4031648/xmlrpc-not-working-on-localhost

But they were aimed at PHP 5.x (by the way, if you’re still on PHP 5.x then update! It’s no longer supported and you’re now a security risk).

Then I refined my search to “apt-get php 7.2 xmlrpc” and had:

• https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000173834-How-to-install-XMLRPC-module-for-PHP-on-Linux-

And I found the helpful suggestion for the info PHP file (you could also just run phpinfo(); in a file) at:

• https://github.com/monitorbacklinks/yii2-wordpress/issues/1

Updated: 14 April 2019

According to this announcement, the old Cloud9 service (c9.io) is soon to be no more, with all functionality ending 30 June 2019, and complete shutdown 30 November 2019.
What is the future of C9? It will be 100% within Amazon Web Services as AWS Cloud9.
I – like many others – am not a fan of AWS. In fact, I think AWS is one of the worst development services I’ve used, and Cloud9 proves it. They took an incredibly powerful and easy to use service and… complicated it. To the point I spent an hour of my Sunday afternoon swearing while trying to setup a new AWS Cloud9 WordPress environment.

As such, I am unsure at this time if I will continue to work with AWS Cloud9 or find an alternate cloud IDE. I use IDEs in a professional capacity and I’m happy to pay for convenience and ease-of-development experience.

Anyway, I won’t be attempting any C9.io workspace upgrades in future. I will, however, create a new post when I decide which development environment to use.

 

Updated: 03 March 2019
After my original environment upgrade I started to see CPU maxing on page loads. I thought it was code changes, but it wasn’t. I run WordPress in my environment and even /wp-admin was causing a 5-20x increase in page load times with 100% CPU spikes.

I happened to find a copy of my environment that was still the original PHP 5.5.9 version and have been using that since a week after this original post. CPU has been fine.

Today I cloned my working environment, did some more searching, and tested a PHP upgrade again. The section “Updated Solution (03 March 2019)” below contains the results of that upgrade. So far, so good. The upgrade process is not that different to the original.

However, /phpmyadmin shows an error “The mbstring extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration.” I’m not surprised because I my script excluded that (see notes within the 03 March section).
I will work on this next, but I wanted to publish updated results before that happens.

---

Updated Solution (03 March 2019)

Today’s results are modified from [and thanks to] https://www.joeferguson.me/install-and-configure-php-7-1-on-cloud-9-workspaces/.

Run the following commands, but note:

• There is a commented out “sudo apt-get install …” line that has “php7.2-mcrypt”. After some research I found: “As of PHP 7.1, the php-mcrypt was deprecated. And as of PHP 7.2 it was completely removed” (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-install-mcrypt-for-php-7-2/).
• II

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y
sudo apt-get update -y

#sudo apt-get install php7.2-curl php7.2-cli php7.2-dev php7.2-gd php7.2-intl php7.2-mcrypt php7.2-json php7.2-mysql php7.2-opcache php7.2-bcmath php7.2-mbstring php7.2-soap php7.2-xml php7.2-zip -y
sudo apt-get install php7.2-curl php7.2-cli php7.2-dev php7.2-gd php7.2-intl php7.2-json php7.2-mysql php7.2-opcache php7.2-bcmath php7.2-mbstring php7.2-soap php7.2-xml php7.2-zip -y

sudo mv /etc/apache2/envvars /etc/apache2/envvars.bak
sudo apt-get remove libapache2-mod-php5 -y
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.2 -y
sudo cp /etc/apache2/envvars.bak /etc/apache2/envvars

sudo a2dismod php5
sudo a2enmod php7.2

sudo service apache2 restart

 

 

 

 

---

Original Post Solutions

Cloud9 is a great online IDE (or it was before the Amazon AWS team got their hands on it).

The problem is the default PHP version in my workspace was 5.6, well out of date and unsupported.

It turns out, upgrading PHP version’s isn’t a simple matter. After much search in found this solution on StackOverflow that worked for me:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/51028239/115704

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y
sudo apt-get update -y

sudo apt-get install php7.2 php-pear php7.2-curl php7.2-dev php7.2-gd php7.2-mbstring php7.2-zip php7.2-mysql php7.2-xml -y

sudo mv /etc/apache2/envvars /etc/apache2/envvars.bak
sudo apt-get remove libapache2-mod-php5 -y
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.2 -y
sudo cp /etc/apache2/envvars.bak /etc/apache2/envvars

sudo a2dismod php5
sudo a2enmod php7.2

sudo service apache2
sudo service apache2 restart