One thing that's been continuously annoying me when doing WordPress development on the go is when something somewhere inside WordPress decides to send requests to external urls when I don't even have Internet connection or it's slow and flaky (tethering, slow Wi-Fi, etc). This results in random lag when loading pages, especially if I haven't opened my dev WordPress instance for a long time.
Turns out there's an easy and undocumented (other than in code) solution. To block external HTTP requests right in WordPress's core itself, open up wp-config.php and add WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL like so:
1 | define('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', true); |
Whenever this variable is present, external requests will be ignored, unless you specify your own comma-separated whitelist of domains using WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS like so:
1 | define('WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'site1.com, site2.com'); |
You can examine relevant core code here and the relevant bug reports here and here.
Happy developing!
In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
