FIX [easyengine] Couldn’t extract WordPress archive error

Downloading WordPress [Fail], Oops Something went wrong !! Calling cleanup actions ... 'ee_mysql_grant_host'

Since last few days, EasyEngine users are facing an issue creating a WordPress site on Ubuntu systems. The error thrown by WP-CLI (which EE uses internally to download WordPress Core) looks something like:

Error: Couldn't extract WordPress archive. unable to decompress gzipped phar archive "/tmp/wp_59cb76c85c61c.tar.gz" to temporary file

Workaround

As the issue itself is not related to EasyEngine, we haven’t released an update from EasyEngine.

But there are multiple workarounds to fix this on your end.

#1. Update WP-CLI to a nightly build (recommended)

The nightly build of WP-CLI is working correctly. You can update WP-CLI using:

sudo wp --allow-root cli update --nightly

Now you should be able to download WordPress successfully using Easy Engine.

#2. Force WP-CLI to download WordPress 4.8.1

Please run following commands in once to create a config.yml file that will override the WP-CLI defaults.

cat < ~/.wp-cli/config.yml
core download:
  version: 4.8.1
EOF

Now, you can create a WordPress site using EasyEngine commands.

It is recommended you update WordPress sites to the latest version. You can do it manually via the admin dashboard, or, you can use WP-CLI to update the site using:

sudo wp core update --allow-root

Reasons

One of the causes of the error was assumed to be due to faulty gzip compression of WordPress’ en_USlocale, which later came out to be false.

Another one was that something went possibly wrong with WP-CLI’s Extractor class which uses PharData() to extract the zip and, as observed by Daniel Bachhuber, the error was indeed indirectly caused by PharData which had its dependency on a Debian PHP patch.

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