How install and use the WP cli to manage your wordpress site

The WP CLI is a great tool you can use to quickly manage your WordPress site. You can use it directly from your terminal, or automated actions via a bash script.

Before you can start using the WP CLI, you need to install it on your server.

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

# Update the permissions and move it to the /usr/local/bin/
chmod +x wp-cli.phar
sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

Now that it’s installed, navigate to the root of your WordPress install. In most common installs of Nginx or Apache2 you will find your installation in the following location.

cd /var/www/html

Note: WP CLI expects you to run commands as linux user and NOT root, if you do run the WP CLI as root you will need to add the following to each command you --allow-root

Let’s start by installing and activating a plugin

 wp plugin install contact-form-7 --activate

Let’s say you want to update only a single plugin

wp plugin update contact-form-7

Let’s update all your plugins

wp plugin update --all

Let’s say you want to update all your plugins expect one

wp plugin update --all --exclude=contact-form-7

Let’s update your WordPress theme

 wp theme update twentytwentyfour

Let’s update all your WordPress themes

wp theme update --all 

Let’s update the WordPress core

wp core update

Let’s do a database backup. You can set the location of the backup, be sure to NOT store database backup in the root of your WordPress install.

wp db export ../backup.sql

Let’s do a database import

wp db import ../backup.sql

These are just a small sample of the vast amount of functions the WP CLI can do. You can find a full list of commands here.

Next Step:

You can run all these commands from a bash script and set up any task scheduler to run them for you. Leave a command if you want to learn how to set that up.