The site had two child theme folders with nearly identical names, one of them a leftover from years back. We pushed styles to the leftover four times.<\/p>\n
Every round went the same way: the push succeeded, the file timestamp updated, the contents were right, and nothing on the page changed.<\/p>\n
Push to a path that doesn’t exist and you get an error. Break the file’s syntax and you get an error. Push to a place that exists but that nothing reads, and nothing happens at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n Over those four rounds we checked, in order: the cache, file permissions, stylesheet load order, selector specificity. All reasonable guesses. None of them was the cause.<\/p>\n Run this once on the server and ask which stylesheet directory is active:<\/p>\n It returns the one actually in use<\/strong>, not the one we inferred from a folder name.<\/p>\n \u26d4 Don’t infer a system’s state from folder names. We chose the names. The state belongs to the system.<\/p>\n This holds elsewhere too. A path in a config file, a connection method in a code comment, a schedule written in the docs: each one is something somebody believed at some point. To know how things are now, ask the machine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The push worked, the file was there, grep found it, and the page didn’t change. It took four rounds before we thought to ask the server.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1015,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-web-notes-en-us"],"yoast_head":"\nOne line settles it<\/h2>\n
get_stylesheet_directory()<\/code><\/pre>\nThe rule<\/h2>\n