Local Environment: Child theme can't be activated

[danielbachhuber]

If you run wp-now --path=/path/to/child-theme, the theme can't be activated because the parent theme is missing.

The parent theme is missing because it isn't mounted into the filesystem.

Done is:

• We're processing the style.css file for the parent them.
• If there is a parent theme, we mount the corresponding directory to the filesystem.

[sejas]

@katinthehatsite, Do you want to take this one?

[katinthehatsite]

let's do this - or at least attempt 😅

[danielbachhuber]

@katinthehatsite I'm going to pick this up so you can focus on your upcoming project.

[danielbachhuber]

With some more reflection, I actually want to hold off on fixing this for now:

• Allow a configuration to map other folders and files #19 might be a more durable fix, because the parent theme can be located in other theme directories.
• It might be nice to automatically install the parent theme from WordPress.org, but I don't know if this is a safe assumption to make.

I'd love to hear more reports from folks who run into this in the wild, and what their scenario is.

[cpapazoglou]

• It might be nice to automatically install the parent theme from WordPress.org, but I don't know if this is a safe assumption to make.

If it doesn't exist locally and if it's a .org theme, yes, it would be nice!

[dmsnell]

Noting here that WordPress also fails if the parent theme is missing. If we can mirror WordPress behavior that seems sufficient. If WordPress can auto-install then that seems reasonable, but for many themes we know this is impossible because they don't exist in the registry.

For those cases it seems sufficient to scope-limit this tool to not solve problems WordPress itself doesn't solve.

[danielbachhuber]

I'm also not sure if we can know definitively that a given theme is a WordPress.org theme.

[cpapazoglou]

I'm also not sure if we can know definitively that a given theme is a WordPress.org theme.

3pd themes usually don't have a slug used in .org. For example

https://api.wordpress.org/themes/info/1.1/?action=theme_information&request%5Bslug%5D=astra returns data for astra theme.

[wojtekn]

For those cases it seems sufficient to scope-limit this tool to not solve problems WordPress itself doesn't solve.

I agree with @dmsnell , local environment tool shouldn't solve WordPress problems that way.

Activating the parent theme would be enough, assuming we use 'wp-content' mode with both themes available or we have support for paths mapping.

[danielbachhuber]

This came up again with #39

For now, let's mount the parent theme directory too if it sits alongside the child theme. More complex configurations can be handled with #19