These notes are for a talk at the WordPress Memphis User Group on October 6, 2016.
WP-CLI is a command line utility for WordPress that I regularly use to manage WordPress sites. WP-CLI works great for small sites and huge multisite installations and without it, some of the work I do – even as simple as updating multiple WordPress sites – would be magnitudes more tedious. This is something that everyone developing or maintaining WordPress sites should be familiar with.
I’ll be covering some of the basic functionality it provides as well as how to install and update it.
Installing
WP-CLI Documentation: Installing WP-CLI
Note that you’ll need to make sure the location of the WP-CLI executable file is in your $PATH; so, you can either download it to a location that’s already in your path or add the location to $PATH; I’ll be doing the latter. The line I added I used for this talk is PATH=$PATH:~/bin (since I’m putting wp-cli.phar in ~/bin)
You’ll also want to change the name from wp-cli.phar to wp so you can run wp from the command line.
Finally, you need to make sure your permissions on the file are set correctly to allow it to be executed; I usually set them to 755 chmod 755 wp
Configuration
WP-CLI Documentation: WP-CLI Configuration
I want to highlight configuration because it will make your life a lot easier if you set up some basic configuration so you don’t have to set flags all the time. You can always override your config with flags
Commands
WP-CLI Documentation: WP-CLI Commands
Finally we get to the commands. I’m going to focus on installing and updating WordPress with the wp core commands and installing and activating plugins with the wp plugin commands
Other notes
I used Homestead/Vagrant for this demo(Yep, homestead works great for WordPress) and I highly recommend Joe Ferguson’s “How I use Laravel Homestead everyday” post which I refer to almost every time I’m setting up a homestead project.