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What a week of hardening litewire turned up. A dependency had a memory bug, one site could open its neighbor's database, a security rule lived only in a comment and every query paid for a needless 1 MB clear.
litewire is the piece of ePHPm that lets PHP apps talk MySQL to a SQLite file. I wrote about how it works and about the MySQL quirks WordPress depends on. This one is the less visible half of August:
Passing WordPress's install tests didn't mean litewire behaved like MySQL. This is the second round of fixes, for the small MySQL behaviors that WordPress and Laravel quietly depend on.
Last month I wrote about running SQLite behind a MySQL socket with litewire. I ended on “passing an install suite is not the same thing as behaving like MySQL”. That turned out to be accurate. On August 10th a few things happened at once:
litewire speaks the MySQL wire protocol on one side and SQLite on the other. That lets WordPress and Laravel run against a .db file without a code change.
Most of the PHP sites I’d put on ePHPm don’t need a MySQL server. A brochure
WordPress, an internal Laravel tool, a preview environment that lives for an afternoon. What they do need is something
that looks like MySQL, because mysqli and pdo_mysql are the only database drivers their code has ever been
pointed at. I mentioned this in the ePHPm pragmatism post as a one-paragraph
“because”. This is the longer version, now that WordPress 7.0 and Laravel 13 both install and…
Luther is a 20+ year software veteran specializing in backend APIs and architecting products. Employed at SUSE as the Team Lead for the Containers on Windows Team working on Rancher + Kubernetes