Has anyone deployed a Frontity App on WPEngine

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1

Hello! I’m super interested in working with Frontity as a project for a client but they host everything on WP Engine and I’m relatively new to the web hosting world so I’d like to know if people have experience working within Frontity on WPEngine?

2

Hi @min! Welcome to the community :relaxed:

I’ve asked the WP Engine team about this and they told me they don’t have support for Node.js yet, so it wouldn’t be possible to Deploy Frontity there.

Nevertheless, you can still use WP Engine for the backend and deploy Frontity in a node server. We strongly recommend Zeit Now as it’s really easy to set up, it’s serverless and it includes CDN. Here you have the guide for the deploy, you’ll see it’s pretty simple.

Please, let us know if you need any help and we’d love to learn more about the project you have in mind :slightly_smiling_face:

3

Great to know! Is there additional extra cost associated with hosting on Zeit Now? We’d like to avoid additional costs if that’s the case, as we already own the domains and everything.

4

Also, supposedly Frontity doesn’t need a Node.js server running, right? Is there anything I can do to host it on WPEngine?

5

Frontity is prepared to be hosted either in a regular Node.js server or in serverless services, but it needs Node in production to run, like explained here.

This means you don’t have to pay for a Node server, you can use a serverless service, which is usually much cheaper. Zeit Now has a free plan that, depending on the case and with a proper cache technique (they support stale-while-revalidate which is pretty nice), would be enough.

If you want to:

  • Use React.
  • Have proper server side rendering (really important for performance and SEO).
  • Don’t have to rebuild and redeploy the whole app each time you publish or modify a post (like in Gatsby or other Static Site Generators).

then there is no way to avoid NodeJS in production because React cannot do server side rendering in PHP.

You could ask them if they are planning to support Node. If not, you’ll need something like Zeit Now. We have more installations coming soon, but please bear in mind that the current “Direct to Frontity” one is the best option and the one we will always recommend.

6

Thanks! One last question! I appear to be having some sort of caching issue happening when I did deploy to Zeit.now? I’ve deployed the site here: https://fortstudio-bxr39ptqf.now.sh/
WIth a very bare bones Mars theme but with a number of small edits pointing to my WPengine Site’s backend as the call. You’ll notice that About Us 404’s but works fine if you refresh it. Then, if you refresh About Us, then clicking on Home will cause that to 404. This isn’t happening locally, is it a Now issue? Should I look there?

7

I’ve seen that the web is being loaded over HTTPS and after that your calls are made over HTTP. I think that changing your source.api to HTTPS at your frontity.settings.js file will solve the problem.

Please, tell us if that’s the case and if not I’ll take a deeper look :slightly_smiling_face:

8

This community is incredible, thanks so much! I love working within this framework, it’s made my life a lot easier :slight_smile: It worked beautifully!

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9

Wow! Glad we could help you :blush: Can’t wait to see what you’re building, it seems really awesome! And if you have any more questions, we’ll be glad to guide you :slightly_smiling_face:

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10

I seem to keep getting an issue like this now. Whenever I load https://fortstudio2019.now.sh/
and click on the nav the first time it will often 404 but when I reload and click again, it loads fine. It doesn’t happen all the time, just sometimes. I’m not sure what this could be caused by now :frowning:

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