title: PHP (Wordpress) on App Engine: gethostbyname failed
body: <p>I have been following the instructions in the App Engine article "<a href="https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/wordpress" rel="nofollow">Running WordPress in App Engine</a>". Particularly on the Dashboard, I keep getting the following errors:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Warning: stream_socket_client(): php_network_getaddresses: gethostbyname failed. errno=0 in /base/data/home/apps/s~lean-writing-001/19.375206187980701020/wordpress/wp-includes/class-http.php on line 895
  Warning: stream_socket_client(): unable to connect to tcp://api.wordpress.org:80 (php_network_getaddresses: gethostbyname failed. errno=0) in /base/data/home/apps/s~lean-writing-001/19.375206187980701020/wordpress/wp-includes/class-http.php on line 895
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I infer from the context of the code that WordPress likes to phone home to check for updates, but I would think that Google's App Engine DNS would resolve their host name.</p>
  
  <p>Yes, I could replace all occurrences of "api.wordpress.org" with one of it's round-robin IP addresses, but I am loathe to hack the WordPress code like that. It's not reliable, and it looks like there are 18 such occurrences.</p>
  
  <p>Is this a red herring for another problem I should be looking for? Did I miss a key step in the above-referenced article?</p>