Skip dangling symlinks when archiving site content

[epeicher]

Related issues

• Related to: reprint-pulled (WP Cloud) sites shipping a dangling advanced-cache.php drop-in symlink.

How AI was used in this PR

Claude Code reproduced the failure, traced it to fs.realpathSync on a dangling symlink aborting the archive, wrote the guard and the unit test, and verified the fix end-to-end (a real preview-site creation against an affected site). I reviewed the diff.

Proposed Changes

Creating a preview site — and pushing — from a reprint-pulled WP Cloud site failed with:

Failed to create preview site: ENOENT: no such file or directory, stat '.../wp-content/advanced-cache.php'

Those sites keep the WP Cloud advanced-cache.php cache drop-in as a symlink pointing into wordpress/drop-ins/, which the pull doesn't download — so it dangles. When archiving wp-content, fs.realpathSync on that broken link threw ENOENT and aborted the whole archive.

Now a dangling symlink is skipped (with a warning) instead of failing the whole operation, so preview create/update and push succeed. This makes the archiver robust to any broken symlink — which matters for sites already pulled, since they keep the dangling drop-in until re-pulled.

The reprint side — not creating the dangling symlink in the first place — is fixed separately in WordPress/reprint.

Testing Instructions

1. On a reprint-pulled WP Cloud site (its wp-content/advanced-cache.php is a broken symlink), rebuild the CLI (npm run cli:build) and run:
   node apps/cli/dist/cli/main.mjs preview create --path ~/Studio/<site>
2. Before: fails with ENOENT ... advanced-cache.php. After: the preview site is created successfully.
3. Unit tests: npm test -- apps/cli/lib/tests/archive.test.ts (includes a dangling-symlink case).

Pre-merge Checklist

• Have you checked for TypeScript, React or other console errors? (tsc -p apps/cli clean, ESLint clean)

[wpmobilebot]

📊 Performance Test Results

Comparing 4ab9f7a vs trunk

app-size

Metric	trunk	4ab9f7a	Diff	Change
App Size (Mac)	1316.93 MB	1316.83 MB	0.11 MB	⚪ 0.0%

site-editor

Metric	trunk	4ab9f7a	Diff	Change
load	1087 ms	1119 ms	+32 ms	⚪ 0.0%

site-startup

Metric	trunk	4ab9f7a	Diff	Change
siteCreation	6508 ms	6513 ms	+5 ms	⚪ 0.0%
siteStartup	1862 ms	1865 ms	+3 ms	⚪ 0.0%

---

Results are median values from multiple test runs.

Legend: 🟢 Improvement (faster) | 🔴 Regression (slower) | ⚪ No change (<50ms diff)

[fredrikekelund]

Good fix regardless of whether the site is Reprint-pulled or not 👍

One thing worth looking into is the calculateDirectorySizeForArchive() function. I'm getting a warning like this from there:

Error processing /Users/fredrik/Studio/my-true-website/wp-content/advanced-cache.php: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, stat '/Users/fredrik/Studio/my-true-website/wp-content/advanced-cache.php'
    at async Object.stat (node:internal/fs/promises:1038:18)
    at async file:///Users/fredrik/Code/studio/apps/cli/dist/cli/rewrite-wp-cli-post-content-wf2YZvuH.mjs:44:22
    at async Promise.all (index 0)
    at async calculateSize (file:///Users/fredrik/Code/studio/apps/cli/dist/cli/rewrite-wp-cli-post-content-wf2YZvuH.mjs:36:5) {
  errno: -2,
  code: 'ENOENT',
  syscall: 'stat',
  path: '/Users/fredrik/Studio/my-true-website/wp-content/advanced-cache.php'

This looks like the exact same underlying problem, so it seems sensible to address in this PR

[fredrikekelund]

Suggested change

	let resolvedPath: string;
	try {
	resolvedPath = fs.realpathSync( path.join( wpContentPath, relativePath ) );
	} catch ( error ) {
	// Dangling symlink. Skip it rather than aborting the whole archive.
	console.warn( `Skipping ${ archiveEntryPath }: ${ error }` );
	continue;
	}
	archiveBuilder.file( resolvedPath, {
	name: archiveEntryPath,
	} );
	try {
	const resolvedPath = fs.realpathSync( path.join( wpContentPath, relativePath ) );
	archiveBuilder.file( resolvedPath, { name: archiveEntryPath } );
	} catch ( error ) {
	// Dangling symlink. Skip it rather than aborting the whole archive.
	console.warn( `Skipping ${ archiveEntryPath }: ${ error }` );
	}

Optional nit, but it doesn't seem necessary to call fs.realpathSync() in a different scope to archiveBuilder.file()

[fredrikekelund]

Suggested change

	let resolvedPath: string;
	try {
	resolvedPath = fs.realpathSync( fullEntryPathOnDisk );
	} catch ( error ) {
	// Dangling symlink. Skip it rather than aborting the whole archive.
	console.warn( `Skipping ${ entryPathRelativeToArchiveRoot }: ${ error }` );
	continue;
	}
	this.archiveBuilder.file( resolvedPath, {
	name: entryPathRelativeToArchiveRoot,
	} );
	try {
	const resolvedPath = fs.realpathSync( path.join( wpContentPath, relativePath ) );
	archiveBuilder.file( resolvedPath, { name: archiveEntryPath } );
	} catch ( error ) {
	// Dangling symlink. Skip it rather than aborting the whole archive.
	console.warn( `Skipping ${ archiveEntryPath }: ${ error }` );
	}

Optional nit. Same thing here

[epeicher]

Good fix regardless of whether the site is Reprint-pulled or not 👍

I agree, the user could create dangling symlinks and we don't want to break some flows.

One thing worth looking into is the calculateDirectorySizeForArchive() function. I'm getting a warning like this from there:
This looks like the exact same underlying problem, so it seems sensible to address in this PR

Yes, that's the same error, let me look at it

[epeicher]

Thanks for the review @fredrikekelund, I have addressed the other functions that were causing noisy warnings. I have turned down the warning so it's still logged that the symlink is skipped, but in a controlled way. Please let me know your view on that, the commit is 4ab9f7a