Wordpress, the Command Line, and You
“What the hell is a wordpress?” is a question you’re definitely not asking yourself right now if you’ve ever even thought about making a website. Everyone and their mama in the web design world knows about Wordpress. It’s open source, it’s fast and easy, insert-percentage-here of the web runs on it, it’s awesome/terrible/flexible/slow, yadda yadda, etc etc, you’ve heard all of this before.
What about the command line? That’s probably a different story. Far less people know the command line than Wordpress; and probably half of those people that know about it are also intimidated by it.
Does that group include you? Do you have no problem installing plugins, customizing themes, or managing Wordpress databases, but get weak in the knees and need to run to the restroom at the thought of typing into that black hole box of potential doom?
Don’t be afraid :)
The command line offers a million ways for you to speed up, automate, and generally make your workflow and life easier.
“But I’m a web developer, not a server administrator; why should I learn the command line? Why should I even read the rest of this dumb article?”
I’m glad you asked. The answer is: WP-CLI.
Short for WordPress CommandLine Interface, WP-CLI has been developed for years, with Github showing its first release back in 2011, but it hasn’t been receiving the attention it deserves.
Here’s a quick list of some of the things you can do with WP-CLI:
Download and install Wordpress
Generate or edit a wp-config file
(Auto)Update one or multiple Wordpress installations
Download, install, and update plugins
Delete themes
Make website+database backups
Debug plugin conflict issues
Build custom plugins
Run custom php with or without loading Wordpress
Run commands remotely to edit Wordpress
Batch Update Serialized wp_options Settings
Delete Wordpress transients
...Basically, anything you can do as an admin on Wordpress in your browser, you can do with WP-CLI, and much much more.
Most web hosts should offer WP-CLI with their Wordpress hosting package. But in case they don’t, here’s how you can install it and get started, using the recommended Phar build! (if you’re using Composer, you can find instructions here )
First, make sure your server has some basic requirements. You’ll need to have:
PHP 5.3.2 or later.
WordPress 3.4 or later.
A Unix-like operating system (OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Cygwin)
Next, download the WP-CLI.phar file using curl or wget:
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WP-CLI/builds/gh-pages/phar/WP-CLI.phar
Test it out by running:
php WP-CLI.phar --info
To be able to just type wp the file needs to be in your PATH and executable. Run:
chmod +x WP-CLI.phar
sudo mv WP-CLI.phar /usr/local/bin/wp
Now try running wp --info
You should get the same output as the first command we tried.
To add bash word completion, run:
wget https://github.com/WP-CLI/WP-CLI/raw/master/utils/wp-completion.bash
Then add to your user’s bash profile (which can be any variation of .bashrc, .profile, .bash_profile, etc):
source /path/to/wp-completion.bash
Don’t forget to change that to your actual path!
Lastly, run:
source ~/.profile to get it completions working
BAM! Wp-cli is now installed* :)
*In order for you to use WP-CLI without issue, the user you used to install WP-CLI must be the user that owns the root directory and subdirectories of where wordpress is installed, or you must be able to run commands as the user that does. Alternatively, you can do everything as root user; WP-CLI will caution against this, but will allow you to run wp commands by adding --allow-root flag to the end of any of your commands. Be careful!
Here’s a quick list of some useful commands:
Download and install the latest version of wordpress. Make sure to change the path to your actual path!
wp core download --path=/var/www/website_rootdirectory
Create a new WP config file. Change db_name and the path to your desired values. After running this you will be prompted to enter the db password you’d like to use.
wp config create --dbname=db_name --dbuser=root --prompt=db_pass --path=/path/to/wp_install
Create your database based on your wp-config file
wp db create
Install Wordpress using your wp-config file and your database
wp core install --url=wpdemo.codestaff.io --title="WP-Cli Demo" --admin_user=admin --admin_password=password --admin_email=codestaff@demo.com
Install a plugin:
wp plugin install plugin_name
You can also search for plugins by replacing “install” with “search” in the above command
Update all your plugins:
wp plugin update --all
Load and execute arbitrary PHP code
wp eval-file /path/to/filename
You can add the flag --skip-wordpress to load and execute without loading wordpress
Activate, deactivate, or check the status of Wordpress’ maintenance mode:
wp maintenance-mode activate
wp maintenance-mode deactivate
wp maintenance-mode status
Import an image and set it to be a post’s featured image. Replace the images path, post id and your desired title
wp media import ~/Downloads/image.png --post_id=123 --title="my post’s featured picture" --featured_image
Troubleshoot a frontend plugin issue/conflict without manually disabling all of them! Run the first three commands separately, then run the final one as a bash loop. It will run through and activate each plugin one at a time; from here you can easily find which plugin is causing you trouble
wp plugin deactivate --all
wp plugin list --status=inactive --field=name
wp plugin list --status=inactive --field=name > pluginlist
while read -r PLUGIN; do
echo "Activating ${PLUGIN}"
wp plugin activate ${PLUGIN}
read -p "Press Enter to continue" </dev/tty
done < pluginlist
That’s just a quick list of some useful commands, we’ll compile a comprehensive list for you to play with soon. You can also check out WP-cli documentation here. What can YOU do with WP-CLI?