patrickposner

Hey @tplomari,
thanks for reporting this!

I tracked down a path-to-URL issue affecting some Local and custom uploads-directory configurations. The ZIP may be written successfully, but Simply Static cannot derive its download URL, resulting in the empty “ZIP archive created:” entry.

I’ve prepared a fix for the next update. As a temporary workaround, set the Temporary Files Directory under Simply Static → Settings → Debug to a writable directory inside wp-content/uploads, then run the export again. If that doesn’t help, please share the Simply Static debug log so I can confirm the configured paths!

Thank you! The exact URL explains the behavior.

This is an upgrade edge case between the full export created with Simply Static 3.1.8 and the filename sanitization used by 3.8.4. The existing media record is considered unchanged during the incremental export, even though its expected exported filename has changed. The HTML is therefore updated to the new filename, but the media file is not copied again.

The generated filename is deterministic: 933db1a4d7081b14748e63e95353a2a4 is the MD5 hash of top-menu-04@2x. This also suggests that WP Multibyte Patch, or an equivalent sanitize_file_namefilter, is active.

No additional setting is required. Running one full export after the upgrade is the correct workaround and establishes a compatible baseline for future incremental exports.

We’ll address the migration case so an incremental export can detect when an existing asset’s stored output path no longer matches its current sanitized path and re-export it automatically.

Thanks again for the detailed reproduction steps.

Hi Liam,

Thanks for the detailed report – especially for narrowing the change down to 3.8.0.

There is a strong Herd-specific candidate here: starting with 3.8.0, Simply Static began verifying SSL certificates for its internal crawler and background loopback requests. Version 3.7.9 did not. On an HTTPS .test site, PHP/cURL can reject Herd’s local certificate even though the browser trusts it.

When that loopback fails, the export may fall back to running inside the REST request that started it. A timeout or PHP warning can then produce the “response is not a valid JSON response” message. WordPress provides a dedicated https_local_ssl_verify filter for these local requests.

Could you confirm whether the Herd site uses HTTPS?

If it does, please temporarily add the following on the local site only:

add_filter( 'ss_remote_get_sslverify', '__return_false' );
add_filter( 'https_local_ssl_verify', '__return_false' );
add_filter( 'wp_archive_creation_job_loopback_available', '__return_true' );

Then, using Simply Static 3.8.4:

1. Go to Simply Static → Settings → Utilities.
2. Click Reset Background Queue.
3. Run another export.

Please remove the snippet after testing and don’t use it on a production site.

If that resolves it, we’ll have confirmed the affected code path. If it doesn’t, could you provide:

• WordPress, PHP and Herd versions
• Whether the site uses HTTP or HTTPS
• The status and response shown for /wp-json/simplystatic/v1/start-export under the browser’s Developer Tools → Network tab
• The relevant Simply Static debug-log entries, with local paths redacted

The response from that REST request should reveal the underlying PHP error or HTML response behind the JSON message.

@muslimpribadi, please either provide a meaningful error report or don’t open a request – no one asked for opinions. Thanks!

@rwhaun Stop hijacking other posts; you’ll get a reply on your own post once we’re done investigating. Thanks!

@jamesjosephfinn Thanks for confirming!

I guess all those hours that we invest in automated test coverage are finally paying off – much easier these days to get this fixed and continuously track that they don’t happen again!

I’ll wrap this into an official release alongside a few other improvements – so it should be safe for you to update on Monday!

@jamesjosephfinn that was helpful!

I got another patch in (yes, even more regex fine-tuning.. 😅): https://github.com/Simply-Static/simply-static/commit/e01c3ab99991ac3b7eaa7b0fcaedb2870c079789

Updated file: https://github.com/Simply-Static/simply-static/blob/master/src/class-ss-url-extractor.php

@jamesjosephfinn, great!

I wrote a small fix here: https://github.com/Simply-Static/simply-static/commit/6266e30f826a0c0659655c5e1c1deb1a260a481e#diff-ee9b14e40d7172b0e4f2bc6f614cfcadec282c85544d24742350bdcbc9d53cce

You might want to download and test this file from here: https://github.com/Simply-Static/simply-static/blob/master/src/class-ss-url-extractor.php (it already includes the patch), but given the 24-hour delay for every release right now on w.org – we might want to confirm that before I push that into an official update! 😅

@thewpuser1 amazing, thank you!