Bug: Autoloader fails is there is no plugins folder

[jay-oswald]

Terms

• I have read the guidelines for Contributing to Roots Projects
• This request is not a duplicate of an existing issue
• I have read the docs and followed them (if applicable)
• I have seached the Roots Discourse for answers and followed them (if applicable)
• This is not a personal support request that should be posted on the Roots Discourse community

Description

What's wrong?

If there is no plugins folder then the autoloader does not work to autoload the mu-plugins. This is an issue as we make sites using bedrock for clients, we put every necessary plugin for the site to function as a mu-plugin via composer/bedrock, then when we deploy we exclude the plugins folder from deploy. This provides us 2 benefits, we can put dev plugins in plugins to help for dev, and clients can add/update their own plugins (or 3rd parties like seo companies) and they do not get effected by new deploys. Because of this initial deploys do not have a plugins folder. This does not appear to be a WordPress issue as the built in functions do not seam to throw any errors, and work as you would expect.

What have you tried?

Creating an empty plugins folder fixes it. Removing it again brings back the issue.

What insights have you gained?

Possible solutions

Temporary workarounds

Create an empty plugins folder.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Have folders in the mu-plugins folder that get autoloaded
2. Delete the plugins folder
3. mu-plugins will no longer load

Expected Behavior

Autoloader should load the mu-plugins regardless of the plugins folder, as it does not seam relevant.

Actual Behavior

mu-plugins do not get loaded if there is no plugins folder

Relevant Log Output

No response

Versions

1.0.4