Creating a WordPress Sandbox environment that resets hourly with Cloudways

I’ve had multiple occasions where I just wanted to try something on a clean install in WordPress. Today we’re setting this up in Cloudways.

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My requirements

• An environment that resets itself every hour
• The database is reset, as well as everything in the wp-content folder
• Show a countdown timer in the top that shows how much time is left before it resets

Let’s get this ball rolling

We’ll start by creating a new application in Cloudways. I’ve called it wpsandbox and attached a domain, let’s call it wpsandbox.example.com. I’ve also added an SSL certificate.

Creating the reset script

Basically, we need to run two commands every 60 minutes, let’s start by adding a cronjob that runs a shell script. Login to your server via SSH and create a file called reset-sandbox.sh in ~/scripts.

mkdir ~/scripts
nano ~/scripts/reset-sandbox.sh

Inside of that file we’ll add some commands: (~/sites/wpsandbox is a symlink to ~/applications/APPLICATION_ID/public_html)
cd ~/sites/wpsandbox/
wp db reset --yes
rm -rf wp-content/plugins/*
rm -rf wp-content/themes/*
rm -rf wp-content/uploads/*
wp core download --force
wp core install --url=https://wpsandbox.example.com --title="WP Sandbox" --admin_user=admin --admin_password=password --admin_email=admin@example.com

Good, save and exit the editor with control-O and control-X.

Adding the script as a cronjob

Cloudways has a UI for adding cronjobs. Go to your application and click Cron Job Management in the sidebar. Open the Advanced tab and add the following line:
0 * * * * /home/master/scripts/reset-sandbox.sh

Adding the countdown timer

Before getting into custom code, let’s see if there are any countdown timer plugins that work for us. There might be a plugin that we can re-configure automatically whenever the installation is reset.

After a bit of research, it doesn’t seem like there are plugins that add this code to the top, which is what I wanted. So I’ll write a quick must-use plugin that displays a shortcode which will be rendered by another plugin. I also need to make sure this plugin cannot be disabled and is re-installed on each new install.

I found a plugin called Event Countdown Timer here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/event-countdown-timer/ which suits our needs. We’ll use the following shortcode:
[tme_countdown background_color="#fff" time_box_color="#fff" time_text_color="#000" time_title_color="#000" countdown_datetime="2021/05/08 17:04" countdown_timezone="UTC"]

The mu-plugin I came up with:

<?php
add_action('wp_body_open', function() {
        $date = new Datetime();
        $date->modify('+1 hour');

        $date->setTime($date->format('H'), 0);

        echo '<style>.tme-countdown {max-width: 100%; background: #fff; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; font-size: 12px; } .tme-countdown-container { width: auto !important;} .tme-countdown .widget-title { font-size: 15px; }$
        echo do_shortcode('[tme_countdown title="This sandbox will reset in:" img_link="" background_color="#fff" time_box_color="#fff" time_text_color="#000" time_title_color="#000" countdown_datetime="'.$date->format('Y/m/d H:i').'" countdown_timezone$
});

add_action('admin_init', function() {
        if ( !is_plugin_active('event-countdown-timer/tme-countdown.php')) {
                activate_plugins('event-countdown-timer/tme-countdown.php');
        }
});

The last thing we need to do is install this plugin on every wipe. Let’s add the following line to our bash script:
wp plugin install event-countdown-timer --activate

That’s it! Since our cronjob is set to run every hour, and the countdown timer is set to countdown to the next hour, they’ll work together flawlessly.