Use of node_modules breaking site on backup and restore

General HivePress
1

Hi,

I love using HivePress, but I ran into a major issue that completely breaks it on hosting platforms (such as Cloudways). HivePress seems to rely on files located inside the node_modules folder to function. However, Cloudways, and many other hosts, deliberately exclude node_modules folders from their backup and restoration routines. They seem to do this because these folders contain thousands of tiny files that bloat backups, cause server timeouts and file sizes can be quite large.

From time to time, I need to restore the entire site. When I restore the site, Cloudways skips the node_modules folder contents, so they’re not restored (i.e. the folder is completely empty). This occurs for at least the Reviews plugin and Bookings plugin, as well as HivePress overall. This breaks the functionality of the frontend and backend of the website and results in multiple console errors, sometimes 40+, because the HivePress core dependency files from node_modules are missing after the restore. I’m unsure if other files or folders are also skipped.

The only way I can fix this issue after restoring the site is to deactivate the affected plugins, delete them, and then reinstall them. Could you let me know if you can look into a fix for this? I would love to keep using the plugin safely but can’t do so as it stands.

Thank you.

2

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5

Hi,

Welcome to the community. :herb:

Thanks for pointing this out.

We’ll improve this in future updates. Generally, the hosting provider should not remove files from plugin backups, especially since the node_modules in this case is relatively small (around 40 MB). Many WordPress plugins also include JavaScript dependencies in a similar way.

To make deployments and backups cleaner, we’ll adjust the packaging process in future releases and ship only the compiled JavaScript assets and production-ready dependencies.

6

Hi,

Thank you for looking into this! I will look forward to those updates. :slight_smile:

1 Like