Storing private data with SSH on WPEngine sites

I’ve been working with several clients hosted on WPEngine lately and whenever I start work on a site, the first step is usually rsyncing all data and running a wp db export with WP-CLI.

Now, my go-to command is wp db export && mv *.sql ~/_sql/ and it worked. So the second step is an scp host:_sql/FILE.sql but that suddenly failed.. What happened?

So, apparently, whenever you start an SSH session with WPEngine, a virtual environment is created, and only the data that exists in /home/wpe-user/sites/SITE is saved. So, all other operations, for example in the home directory, just vanish into the void.

What’s the solution?

Well, there is ONE folder that is not publicly accessible that can be used for persistent storage. It’s the _wpeprivate folder which you can find it sites/SITE. Any data added here is kept in place, and will not be accessibly publicly.

WPEngine did have an issue with it before, you can read about it here and here but this issue is now solved. Database credentials are stored here as well, so you should be fine!

Happy devvin’!