Tag: wp-cli

Git & WP-CLI on Windows

This short tutorial will help you get ready for WordPress development by setting up a localhost development environment with git and wp-cli on Windows.

The following tutorial / notes are for setting up a new localhost development environment in Windows.

1. Setup your Localhost Environment

  1. Download the Bitnami WordPress installer
  2. Follow onscreen instructions and Install!

That’s it~

I put my development environment in the D:/ drive 

D:/Bitnami/WordPress

2. Prepare for git with VS Code

Gitbash (git for Windows) wants a default text editor – and while you could choose Nano or VIM or Notepad++, why not go with the (NEW!) option and get yourself a really great code editor while you’re at it~

  1. Download the Visual Studio Code installer
  2. Follow onscreen instructions and Install!

Learn about customizing Visual Studio Code for WordPress development.

3. Setup git with Gitbash

  1. Download the Gitbash installer
  2. Follow onscreen instructions and Install!
    1. Note: In the “Adjusting your PATH environment” screen, click “Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt”

4. Setup WP-CLI in Windows

Take a look at this walkthrough. I followed the steps outlined within it and made a few notes about the process for my particular setup.

  1. Download the wp-cli.phar file (right-click and “Save As…”)
  2. Create a new folder within your Windows user’s folder to hold all our executable files
    1. Create C:\Users\user\bin (where “user” is your Windows username)
    2. This is the ~\bin folder where ~\ indicates the user’s home directory
  3. In Visual Studio Code, create a wp.bat file with the following content:
@ECHO OFF
SET BIN_TARGET=%~dp0/./wp-cli.phar
php "%BIN_TARGET%" %*

This will execute the wp-cli.phar command from your command line (after doing a little more setup work).

  1. But, if you’re using Gitbash, Windows won’t recognize .bat files and their commands, so we need to create a separate file called wp (no file extension).
  2. In Visual Studio Code, you may get an error if you try to create and save a file with no extension, so just call it wp.sh for now.
  3. Later, in Windows Explorer you can remove the .sh.
  4. Paste in the following lines:
#!/usr/bin/env sh

dir=$(d=${0%[/\\]*}; cd "$d"; pwd)

# See if we are running in Cygwin by checking for cygpath program
if command -v 'cygpath' >/dev/null 2>&1; then
   # Cygwin paths start with /cygdrive/ which will break windows PHP,
   # so we need to translate the dir path to windows format. However
   # we could be using cygwin PHP which does not require this, so we
   # test if the path to PHP starts with /cygdrive/ rather than /usr/bin
   if [[ $(which php) == /cygdrive/* ]]; then
       dir=$(cygpath -m $dir);
   fi
fi

dir=$(echo $dir | sed 's/ /\ /g')
"${dir}/wp-cli.phar" "$@"

So the previous step (wp.bat) makes wp-cli available from the Windows Command Line, and this step (wp.sh) makes wp-cli available from Gitbash.

5. Add php and wp-cli to the PATH

Now, we have to make sure Windows adds both php and wp-cli to the PATH so we can use them.

  1. Open up the Windows Control Panel → System (or right-click “My Computer” on the Desktop and click “Properties”)
  2. Click “Advanced system settings” in the left sidebar
  3. Click “Environment Variables…” in the popup
  4. Click “PATH” from the list and then “Edit…”
  5. Now add the full path to your executable files. In my case:
    1. PHP: D:\Bitnami\WordPress\php
    2. WP-CLI: C:\Users\user\bin
  6. Now, “Sign Out” of your Windows account and Log back in to be sure Windows loads the new PATH variables
  7. You can confirm both php and wp-cli are working by trying out a few different commands in Gitbash or the Command Prompt:
    1. php -i
    2. which php
    3. php -V
    4. wp
    5. wp plugin install hello-dolly (from inside your Bitnami/WordPress/htdocs/wp-content/plugins folder)

Great! Now you can use git and wp from the command line in Windows! Happy coding!~

Downloads

  1. Bitnami WordPress installer
  2. VS Code
  3. Gitbash
  4. wp-cli.phar file

Welcome to WP-CLI!

I have limited experience with wp-cli but I know it’s a really quick and convenient way to manage WordPress installations. And recently I’ve been using ssh to to manage my sites more often, so I thought it would be a good time to investigate it more deeply.

I’m hosting this site on Dreamhost.com (my host since 2009), and I recently went through their One-Click install to quickly add WordPress here. But, strange thing is, I didn’t receive an email from them with my username/password combination – so I had no way to login (at first). 

After a quick Google search, I noticed that Dreamhost has a page about resetting your password – including a section on using wp-cli. 

I have limited experience with wp-cli but I know it’s a really quick and convenient way to manage WordPress installations. And recently I’ve been using ssh to to manage my sites more often, so I thought it would be a good time to investigate it more deeply.

Here’s a list of the very first commands I’m running on my new WP install – as well as some I intend to put to greater use in the future.

Login

First of all, we need to ssh into the server and access the site.

$ ssh username@site.com
$ cd site.com/wordpress

Change user password

$ wp user list
+----+-------------+---------------+------------------+---------------------+---------------+
| ID | user_login  | display_name  | user_email       | user_registered     | roles         |
+----+-------------+---------------+------------------+---------------------+---------------+
| 1  | myusername  | myusername    | user@example.com | 2018-03-17 11:14:28 | administrator |
+----+-------------+---------------+------------------+---------------------+---------------+
$ wp user update 1 --user_pass=NewerBetterStrongerPassword123$
Success: Updated user 1

Create an alias to check for updates

One of the coolest things I found was that you can create an alias to run a series of wp-cli commands one after the other. The following command will check for WP core, plugin, and theme updates at once.

$ alias check-all='wp core check-update && wp plugin list --update=available && wp theme list --update-available'
$ check-all
Success: WordPress is at the latest version.
+------+--------+--------+---------+
| name | status | update | version |
+------+--------+--------+---------+
+------+--------+--------+---------+
+-----------------+----------+--------+---------+
| name            | status   | update | version |
+-----------------+----------+--------+---------+
| twentyfifteen   | inactive | none   | 2.0     |
| twentyseventeen | active   | none   | 1.7     |
| twentysixteen   | inactive | none   | 1.5     |
+-----------------+----------+--------+---------+

Update and manage core, plugins, & themes

While I could probably create another alias to update everything at once, I haven’t yet because I still like to do some things step-by-step. So, here are the three commands needed to update or manage WP core, plugins, and themes:

$ wp core update
$ wp core update --version=4.7.1

$ wp plugin update --all
$ wp plugin status
$ wp plugin install plugin-name
$ wp plugin activate plugin-name
$ wp plugin deactivate plugin-name
$ wp plugin delete plugin-name

$ wp theme update --all
$ wp theme status theme-name
$ wp theme install theme-name --activate

Many of the plugin and theme commands are quite similar and you can do certain things like stringing together some of them (wp theme install theme-name --activate).

Check your config file or databases

A couple more useful commands are to check out your wp-config file’s constants and globals, and work with your database:

$ wp config get

$ wp db size --tables
$ wp db optimize
$ wp db repair
$ wp db export filename.sql

Clean up post revisions

Sometimes you just need to clean up your post revisions, especially if your site is old or has loads of them. But first, you’ll need to install an additional wp-cli package.

$ wp package install trepmal/wp-revisions-cli
$ wp revisions clean

Or, for specific posts and/or dates:

$ wp revisions list --post_id=ID
$ wp revisions clean --post_id=ID --before-date="YYYY-MM-DD"

Remove all spam comments

This one looks to be a great help, especially for big installations that get a lot of spam. But there are quite a few other commands to help manage comments.

$ wp comment delete $(wp comment list --status=spam --format=ids)

Resources