WP CLI in a nutshell

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Start – Getting things in place

First up, you’ll need SSH access and navigate to the directory where your WordPress install lives. This can vary greatly by the host, though should be visible within your hosting control panel.

Let’s say that my web root is /www/ed/public_html – many times you can there or close by running cd ~ You can always run pwd to see the current directory you’re working in.

Remember, we’re looking for our WordPress file structure. Find this by using ls – you should see a list of files and directories that include:

 wp-activate.php
 wp-admin
 wp-blog-header.php
 wp-comments-post.php
 wp-config.php
 wp-config.php.save
 wp-config-sample.php
 wp-content
 wp-cron.php
 wp-includes
 wp-links-opml.php
 wp-load.php
 wp-login.php
 wp-mail.php
 wp-settings.php
 wp-signup.php
 wp-trackback.php
 xmlrpc.php

Let’s make sure that WP CLI is installed and available and installed correctly:

wp cli info – gives a breakdown of the configuration.

wp help will bring up the CLI’s help screen which can show you which commands it’s capable of as well as arguments, flags, etc.

If you’re using a VPS or un-managed server, you’ll likely need to switch to a user without root privileges, WP CLI will let you know about this as well: do not run WP CLI commands in root.

Interacting with WordPress

Now that we know everything is in place to use WP CLI, let’s fire some commands.

wp core – simply outputs the current WordPress version

wp plugin – displays all plugins installed (active and inactive)

wp theme – same as above, but for themes

wp maintenance-mode – allows you to enable or disable the built-in WP maintenance mode. This can be useful if you need to quickly render your site unaccessible, or if you get the stuck maintenance message while updating WP things. wp maintenance-mode activate to deactivate, replace activate with deactivate

wp option – quickly view/add/update WP database options. example: wp option get site_url – you can use wp option set to update any option value.

wp db – more general database options

wp search-replace – yet another database option, this allows you to replace instances of text

wp network – yes, it supports WP multisite networks as well. (we’ll dive deeper into this in it’s own article)

wp super-admin – quickly add multisite super admin privileges to a WP user

wp config – generate a new wp-config.php file, or even use the tool to create new salts with wp config shuffle-salts

wp server – really cool for local environments, it uses PHP to create a web server on localhost

Flags and subcommands

Nearly every command has a similar list of subcommands, this includes: list, add, install, activate, delete, update

Sometimes we’re drawn to WP CLI when the site we’re working on is experiencing issues, most commonly 500/PHP Fatal errors. The specific issue really depends on what parts of WP CLI will throw errors, but we do have some options with the skip flags. If a plugin or the theme is causing the issue, this should work: --skip-themes --skip-plugins