GCP WordPress Click to deploy VM – How to increase size upload limit

First of all you can find the php.ini file being used by your WordPress by hosting a a file named whatever.php in your Webserver’s Document Root folder. Please put inside that file the following contents inside that file:

<?php

phpinfo();

That’s right, you don’t have to close the ?> short tags at the end of the file.

Then, hit that file through your http://yoursite/whatever.php address and check the output of where php,ini is set to.

• You don’t have to use the whatever.php name for that file, use something obscure so only you know the name, once done, remove it from the path. I’ve made this example and list it here in this thread as a hypothetical file name, so, if you decide to rename whatever.php to something else, adjust your URL’s accordingly when hitting it.

• If you have not yet configured a domain name for this WordPress, your hostname will be your given Public IP Address.

• In that case, you should replace http://hostname/whatever.php with http://x.x.x.x/whatever.php, where x.x.x.x is your assigned Public IP Address.

• If your website is using TLS/SSL, you must start with https://hostname/whatever.php or https://x.x.x.x/whatever.php, note the extra s letter in https://

If you think that’s too much of a hassle, then you can ssh into your VM and run the following find command:

sudo find / -name php.ini -type f

You will most likely find the file at the /etc/php/php.ini path.

Then, edit the file with your preferred code editor. Hint: vim ftw!

Tyoe:

sudo vim /etc/php/php.ini

Then, hit /, this will activate vim‘s powerful search feature.

Once that’s done, find the proper entry upload_max_filesize hit Enter.

Once you find the entry, hit I as in insert.

Change it to the appropriate value you wish, make sure not to make it so big to avoid security issues later.

As a default, I think it starts with 2M, but, this template may have it modified for WordPress usage already, not sure.

Pick something like 100M (100 megabytes) for its value, that’s a lot for a single file IMHO, but some templates may need it.

Go figure. Adjust to something slightly bigger than your template’s size amount, give it or take.

To save and close, first hit Escape then type :wq, as in Write and Quit!

Once done, either reboot the machine or run the following command:

If using a distro such as CentOS and Apache as the Webserver

sudo service httpd restart

If using a distro such as CentOS and Nginx as the Webserver

sudo service httpd restart

If using a distro such as Ubuntu/Debian and Apache as the Webserver

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

If using a distro such as Ubuntu/Debian and Nginx as the Webserver

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

This will reload the Webserver’s configuration and so does PHP as it is a module for that Webserver.

That should do it.

Hint: You can also verify the PHP setting for upload_max_filesize inside of that phpinfo url http://hostname/whatever.php.

Use Ctrl/Command +F as the best Friend in such situations! Yay!

Also Welcome to StackOverflow and a great choice in choosing Google Cloud!

Full Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud! 🙂