WP-CLI

A command line interface for WordPress

WP-CLI is a set of command-line tools for managing WordPress installations. You can update plugins, set up multisite installs and much more, without using a web browser.

Requirements

Installing (And Upgrading)

First, download wp-cli.phar using wget or curl. For example:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

Then, check if it works:

php wp-cli.phar --info

To be able to type just wp, instead of php wp-cli.phar, you need to make the file executable and move it to somewhere in your PATH. For example:

chmod +x wp-cli.phar
sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

Now try running wp --info.

Upgrade using the same procedure.

MAMP

If you’re using MAMP, you will probably get a MySQL error, because the php found in your PATH is not the same as the PHP used by MAMP. Here is one way to fix it.

More resources:

Tab completions

WP-CLI also comes with a tab completion script for Bash. Just download wp-completion.bash and source it from ~/.bash_profile:

source /FULL/PATH/TO/wp-completion.bash

(Don’t forget to run source ~/.bash_profile afterwards)

Using

Go into a WordPress root folder:

cd /var/www/wp/

Typing wp should show you output similar to this:

Available commands:
    wp blog create|delete
    wp cache add|decr|delete|flush|get|incr|replace|set|type
    wp comment create|delete|trash|untrash|spam|unspam|approve|unapprove|count|status|last
    wp core download|config|is-installed|install|install-network|version|update|update-db
    wp db create|drop|reset|optimize|repair|connect|cli|query|export|import
    wp eval-file
    ...

See 'wp help <command>' for more information on a specific command.

Let’s try to install the Hello Dolly plugin from wordpress.org:

wp plugin install hello-dolly

Output:

Installing Hello Dolly (1.5)

Downloading install package from http://downloads.WordPress.org/plugin/hello-dolly.1.5.zip ...
Unpacking the package ...
Installing the plugin ...
Plugin installed successfully.

Multisite

On a multisite installation, you need to pass a --url parameter, so that WP-CLI knows which site it’s supposed to be operating on:

wp theme status --url=localhost/wp/test

If you have a subdomain installation, it would look like this:

wp theme status --url=test.example.com

If you’re usually working on the same site most of the time, you can create a wp-cli.yml file in the root directory:

url: test.example.com

Then, you can call wp without the --url parameter again:

wp theme status

Adding commands

Adding commands to WP-CLI is as easy as creating a PHP class. See the Commands Cookbook for more info.

Please share the commands you make by adding them to the List of community commands.

Contributors