Wordfence with AWS Elastic Beanstalk

  • Resolved jamierobinson

    (@jamierobinson)


    5 years, 11 months ago

    Hi, I’m running WordPress on Amazon Web Service’s “Elastic Beanstalk” service. It’s a very basic site so the current workflow is to make changes as required using the normal WordPress panel, then periodically take a copy of the entire installation via FTP and upload that to Elastic Beanstalk. The idea being that if a server goes down or I update the ELB environment, a reasonably recent WordPress installation + plugins/theme etc will be deployed.

    The only thing that is stopping me doing this with Wordfence is that the wp-content/wflogs folder is mostly not accessible via FTP, making this backup method a bit uncertain!

    Two questions really; if I upload a bundle without these wflogs files, will the firewall just start learning from scratch again? Or will I corrupt the installation?

    More generally, how do you recommend to deploy your plugin whilst using AWS’s ELB; I presume this is a common enough setup to have seen it before…

    Many thanks in advanced ??

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Hi @jamierobinson,

    Wflogs allows Wordfence to block traffic before WordPress or the database has finished loading. So if you upload a bundle without wflogs, you won’t get protection for when your database is inaccessible. However, IPs and rules that are saved within the database will still be active. You won’t corrupt the installation if the wflogs folder is missing, nor will the firewall reset and start learning from scratch.

    Unfortunately there isn’t a way to get wflogs working on a disposable instance such as ELB or GAE (Google App Engine). The purpose of a PaaS (in your case, your EBS) is to be a resilient and optimized environment. The imposes limitations that causes writing persistent data into the code directory to not be allowed. My only recommendation would be to use rent a VPS or dedicated server, as this would allow Wordfence or any WordPress plugin access to write to the document folder with code.

    Dave

    Thread Starter jamierobinson

    (@jamierobinson)

    Are the wflogs files created from the DB when the server is created and (presumably) WordPress is loaded for the first time? So within a short time I should be back to full protection?

    Whilst not optimal, the above is a good working solution for me! ??

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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