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WP-CLI is the official command line tool for interacting with and managing your WordPress sites.

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Installing Edit

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Recommended installation

The recommended way to install WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ is by downloading the Phar build (archives similar to Java JAR files, see this article for more detail), marking it executable, and placing it on your PATH.

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. If WP-CLI is installed successfully, you’ll see output like this:

OS:  Linux 4.10.0-42-generic #46~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Mon Dec 4 15:57:59 UTC 2017 x86_64
Shell:   /usr/bin/zsh
PHP binary:    /usr/bin/php
PHP version:     7.1.12-1+ubuntu16.04.1+deb.sury.org+1
php.ini used:   /etc/php/7.1/cli/php.ini
MySQL binary:
MySQL version:
SQL modes:
WP-CLI root dir:        /home/wp-cli/.wp-cli
WP-CLI packages dir:    /home/wp-cli/.wp-cli/packages/
WP-CLI global config:   /home/wp-cli/.wp-cli/config.yml
WP-CLI project config:
WP-CLI version: 1.5.0

Voila! You’re now an official WP-CLI user.

Wondering what to do next? Check out the quick start guide for a short introduction and some example usage.

Updating WP-CLI

If you have installed WP-CLI using the recommended Phar method, you can update it at any time by running wp cli update (although if WP-CLI is owned by root, that may be sudo wp cli update). If you installed WP-CLI using the Composer or GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/.-based installations, see the specific instructions for updating associated with each method below.

When you run wp cli update, you’ll be prompted to confirm that you wish to update with a message similar to the following:

You have version 0.21.1. Would you like to update to 0.23.1? [y/n]

After you accept, you should see a success message:

Success: Updated WP-CLI to 0.23.1

If you’re already running the latest version of WP-CLI, you’ll see this message:

WP-CLI is at the latest version.

Want to live life on the edge? Run wp cli update --nightly to use the latest nightly build of WP-CLI. The nightly build is more or less stable enough for you to use in your local environment, and always includes the latest and greatest.

For more information about wp cli update, including flags and options that can be used, read the full docs page on the update command.

Tab completions

Bash & Z-Shell

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

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

To have this change take effect in your currently active shell, run source ~/.bash_profile afterwards.

Oh My Zsh

If you’re using the Oh My Zsh framework, you can enable the built-in wp-cli plugin, by adding it to the plugins=(wp-cli git [...]) line in your ~/.zshrc file.

Note: the Oh My Zsh pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party comes with the bash completion script included, so it’s unnecessary to have both.

To have this change take effect in your currently active shell, run source ~/.zshrc afterwards.

Fish

If you’re using the Fish shell, you can download wp.fish and move it to ~/.config/fish/completions/wp.fish.
Afterwards just type wp and press TAB, and fish will automatically source wp.fish.

Dash/Alfred workflow

If you’re using Dash and Alfred, you can add a custom Alfred workflow to look up WP-CLI command information.

Setup

Open Dash and download the WP-CLI docset:
Dash › Preferences › Downloads › User Contributions › Search for WP-CLI

Still in Dash, activate the Alfred integration:
Dash › Preferences › Integration › Alfred

Usage

Open Alfred and try searching for a specific command. For example, this gives you an overview of the plugin command and its subcommands: wp-cli plugin

Alternative installation methods

Installing via Git

If you intend to work on WP-CLI itself, see the Setting up section in Pull Requests.

Installing nightly via Phar

The “nightly” is the bleeding-edge version of WP-CLI, built straight from the main branch.

Just follow the normal installation instructions, except change the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org to the phar file:

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

Installing via Composer

As part of a project

Add the following line to your project’s composer.json file:

"require" : {
    "wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle": "*"
}

To add any additional suggested packages seen in the wp-cli-bundle package, such as psy/psysh, run:

composer require --dev $(composer suggests --by-package | awk '/wp-cli\/wp-cli-bundle/' RS= | grep -o -P '(?<=- ).*(?=:)')

Optionally (if run on a server or for e.g. in a virtual machine locally) you can automate setting up the command and making it available in the users path. Let’s assume Composer installed into /var/www/vendor (you can get the composer vendor-dir config variable specific to your machine via composer config --list | grep "\[vendor-dir\]"), we can add the following scripts/commands to the composer.json file. The second and third line set up bash completion so we don’t have to remember every single command:

"scripts" : {
    "post-install-cmd" : [
        "[[ -f /usr/bin/wp ]] || sudo ln -s /var/www/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/bin/wp /usr/bin/wp",
        "source /var/www/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/utils/wp-completion.bash",
    "[[ -f ~/.bash_profile ]] || touch ~/.bash_profile",
        "source ~/.bash_profile"
    ]
}

Above script assumes that your current shell is bash, which might not be the case for all users. Example for a vagrant box (added to the scripts-blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.):

cat /etc/passwd | grep $(whoami)
vagrant:x:1000:1000::/home/vagrant:/bin/bash

In case you got bash available and installed for your OS, you can switch dynamically:

"scripts" : {
    "post-update-cmd" : [
        "/bin/bash -c \"[[ -f /usr/local/bin/wp ]] || sudo ln -s /var/www/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/bin/wp /usr/bin/wp\"",
        "/bin/bash -c \"source /var/www/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/utils/wp-completion.bash\"",
    "/bin/bash -c \"[[ -f ~/.bash_profile ]] || touch ~/.bash_profile\"",
        "/bin/bash -c \"source ~/.bash_profile\""
    ]
}

As a project

Needs php and composer (or php composer.phar) set up as console commands.

composer create-project wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle --prefer-source

Then run wp-cli-bundle/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/bin/wp or add wp-cli-bundle/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/bin folder to PATH for global wp command (on Windows, use wp-cli/bin/wp.bat instead).

To update, you’ll need to:

cd wp-cli-bundle
git pull origin main
composer install

Global require

If you prefer to have PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. tools installed globally via Composer and have something like ~/.composer/vendor/bin in your PATH (or C:\Users\you\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\bin on Windows), you can just run:

composer global require wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle

To update everything globally, run composer global update.

Installing a specific version

If you want to install a specific version of WP-CLI then append the version numbers behind the packages

composer create-project wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle:2.1.0 --no-dev

The version must be in a format that Composer can understand and can be found on packagist.org.

Installing bleeding-edge

If you want to install bleeding-edge then use dev-main:

composer create-project wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle:dev-main --no-dev

Installing globally as a project

You can specify a custom install path for WP-CLI, like so:

composer create-project wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle /usr/share/wp-cli --no-dev

Then, just symlink the binary:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/wp-cli-bundle/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/bin /usr/bin/wp

Installing via Homebrew

brew install wp-cli

Here’s the formula.

Installing via Docker

The Docker community maintains WordPress and WP-CLI images.

To include the WP-CLI image in your own project:

image: wordpress:cli

Installing on Windows

Install via composer as described above or use the following method.

Make sure you have php installed and in your path so you can execute it globally.

Download wp-cli.phar manually and save it to a folder, for example c:\wp-cli

Create a file named wp.bat in c:\wp-cli with the following contents:

@ECHO OFF
php "c:/wp-cli/wp-cli.phar" %*

Add c:\wp-cli to your path:

setx path "%path%;c:\wp-cli"

You can now use WP-CLI from anywhere in Windows command line.

Installing via .deb package

On Debian or Ubuntu, just download and open one of the .deb packages: https://github.com/wp-cli/builds/tree/gh-pages/deb

Installing on Fedora 30+

su -c 'dnf install wp-cli'

Installing on CentOS

su -c 'yum install wp-cli'

Using a custom PHP binary

In some cases, like for MAMP installs, you might not want to use the default PHP binary.

To use the latest PHP version provided by MAMP, you’ll need to modify your PATH environment variable with the following added to your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zsh_profile:

PHP_VERSION=$(ls /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/ | sort -n | tail -1)
export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/${PHP_VERSION}/bin:$PATH

To use a specific PHP version provided by MAMP, you’ll need to determine the path to the PHP version’s executable, and modify your PATH environment variable with the following added to your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zsh_profile:

export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.5.26/bin:$PATH

Note there’s no assignment of the PHP_VERSION variable in this case, because we aren’t dynamically looking up the latest PHP version.

Once you have added that and saved the file, reload the file with:

source ~/.bash_profile

After you’ve done that, run wp --info to make sure the change has been applied correctly.

For Composer and Git-based WP-CLI installation, you can alternatively set the WP_CLI_PHP environment variable, if you don’t want to modify PATH for some reason.

Installing on MediaTemple

See http://razorfrog.com/installing-wp-cli-on-mediatemple-grid-server/

Last updated: September 9, 2024

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