In this tutorial, we are going to work with Wordpress command line interface (WP-CLI). It is specifically developed to manage WordPress websites using CLI. As it makes the WordPress work easier, it also allows working faster with WordPress. We can manage WordPress and its setting without navigating and clicking on several pages.

Using WordPress CLI  we can complete the administrative tasks like updating themes, plugins installations, publishing post and many more. Before installing WP-CLI, You should make sure your hosting account has SSH access to you.

Basic Requirements

• PHP(5.3.2 or later)
• WordPress (3.4 or later)
• UNIX like environment like Ubuntu, Linux.

Installing WP-CLI

Open the terminal and paste the below code

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

It will download the WP-CLI files to your root directory. Now, we will make it executable by using this command.

chmod +x wp-cli.phar

type this to check if it works

php wp-cli.phar --info

to use "wp" at command start instead of "php wp-cli.phar" move the wp-cli.phar file to a wp directory

sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

Now we can execute WP-CLI commands by using 'wp'. You can also try "wp --info" command.

Installing WordPress setup on the server using WP-CLI.

We can install the WordPress using a single command "wp core install". Only we have to pass few parameters such as site name, admin name, URL etc.

wp core install --url="DomainURL"  --title="Website Title" --admin_user="adminUsername" --admin_password="adminPassword" --admin_email="adminEmail"

Installing themes and plugins using WP-CLI

If you have spent lots of time clicking and installing plugins and themes from the dashboard, this feature will amaze you. It is much quicker than doing it manually.

wp theme install twentyeighteen

the above command will install the twewentyeighteen theme, to activate the theme you can use

wp theme activate twentyeighteen

Similarly, you can install and activate plugins using these commands

wp plugin install woocommerce
     wp plugin activate woocommerce

Updating plugins and Themes using WP-CLI

You can save our time to update the core and plugins by using this single line commands.

To update the core to the latest release, you can use this command.

wp core update

you can also install the specific version of WordPress

wp core update --version=4.7

you can also revert back to the previous version forcefully by amending this command at the end of above command

wp core update --version=4.4 --force

TO update the themes and plugins individually you can use this command

wp theme update twentyseventeen
wp plugin update woocommerce

to update all you can use the below command

wp theme update --all
wp plugin update --all

You can read about the WP-CLI commands. There are lots of commands to update post, comments, options, take DB backup etc. You can control the WordPress structure using the CLI and can save lots of time to implement on other projects.

Resources: WordPress CLI