Automattic / Automattic/wp-codebox

Playground latest runtime fails before WordPress boot with SQLite ABSPATH fatal

Open
#716 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
16
Forks
4
Avg merge
59m
Merged PRs (30d)
131

Description

## Summary
Running a WP Codebox recipe with the default `latest` WordPress runtime can fail before WordPress boots. The failure happens inside Playground's SQLite preload path, before caller code or recipe workflow steps execute.

## Observed failure
A Studio Web website-generation bench run using WP Codebox recipe-run failed during `workflow.steps[0]` startup with:

```text
Recipe workflow steps[0] failed: WordPress Playground CLI exited while booting the runtime with exit code 1.
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Undefined constant "ABSPATH" in /internal/shared/sqlite-database-integration/constants.php:39
Stack trace:
#0 /internal/shared/sqlite-database-integration/wp-includes/sqlite/db.php(15): require_once()
#1 /internal/shared/mu-plugins/sqlite-database-integration.php(42): require_once('/internal/share...')
#2 /internal/shared/preload/0-sqlite.php(57): require_once('/internal/share...')
#3 /internal/shared/preload/0-sqlite.php(33): Playground_SQLite_Integration_Loader->load_sqlite_integration()
#4 /internal/eval.php(10): Playground_SQLite_Integration_Loader->__call('check_connectio...', Array)
```

## Expected behavior
`latest` should be a valid default WordPress runtime for WP Codebox recipes, including recipes that need the current WordPress AI/client runtime surface.

## Notes
- This is separate from PR #715, which centralizes WP Codebox's default WordPress runtime as `latest`.
- Do not work around this by downgrading the default runtime. Downstream callers can explicitly pin a version when they intentionally need an older runtime, but the default should remain current.

## AI assistance
- **AI assistance:** Yes
- **Tool(s):** OpenCode (GPT-5.5)
- **Used for:** Capturing the observed failure and drafting the issue from lab run output.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.