Tag Archives: wp-cli

wp-cli-git-helper: Git commands for wp-cli

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At this year’s WordPress Community Summit there was an interesting session about the many uses of the delightful wp-cli. One idea was that wp-cli could handle some simple git commands intelligently, so that, for instance, updating a plugin would automatically generate a changeset for the update with a descriptive message. After some back and forth with the wp-cli team, I decided to build this as a community package. It’s available here: wp-cli-git-helper.

This will be a huge time saver for me as I manage client sites. If it helps you, that’s super too. Pull requests welcome for Kewl New Features.

Manually copy content and settings between sites in a WP network

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I just had a request to copy the contents and settings from one site within a WordPress network to another within the same network. (The destination site is the “staging” version of the source.) Daniel Bachhuber’s Dictator along with the general wp-cli export/import tools are the ideal tools for this sort of thing, but due to some odd circumstances I wasn’t able to use them. So here’s a quick rundown of what I ended up doing. (This post mainly for my own records. If any step below is confusing to you, you probably should not be doing it this way. Use at your own risk!)

  • Get exports of the production db tables (as well as staging, for backup). I ended up crafting the following (614 is the ID of the production site):
    [code language=”bash”]mysql -u [username] -p information_schema -B -N -e “SELECT table_name FROM tables WHERE table_name LIKE ‘wp_614_%'” | xargs mysqldump -u [username] -p [database name] –add-drop-table –skip-lock-tables –quick –extended-insert –result-file=[/path/to/dumpfile.sql][/code]
  • I downloaded that dumpfile and imported it into a local database, so that I could run it through https://github.com/interconnectit/Search-Replace-DB to do the necessary URL replacements. (Could’ve used wp-cli, but this way I didn’t need to have a functional local WP installation.)
  • Did a further search and replace to change instances of ‘wp_614_’ to ‘wp_860_’ (the staging site ID)
  • Uploaded that .sql file and imported
  • Next, I had to handle files. Normally this would take 30 seconds at the command line, but permissions were locked down on this server: my SSH user didn’t have proper permissions to modify some of the directories in blogs.dir. So I wrote a quick script that would run the necessary commands in PHP (as the webserver user), implemented as an mu-plugin: https://gist.github.com/boonebgorges/75e3ec70bd5177dab7dd

Again, use at your own risk.

Getting started with WordPress plugin development

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I got an email with the following question, and figured I may as well answer publicly. The question comes from someone who’s an experienced programmer, but has never worked with WordPress before.

[…] I wondered if you had some helpful advice on learning the basics of WP plugin development. I’m mostly hoping there are frameworks/libraries that the community is currently using.

I don’t know of a widely-used library of general WP plugin development tools. Partly this is because WP itself partially qualifies as a “library”, insofar as it provides ready-to-use functions for saving data to the database, URL routing, template loading, user management, etc. And partly it’s because the architecture of WP is so wide open that it’d be difficult to build a more generalized library that covered even a majority of the possible modifications you might make to stock WordPress.

That said, here are a few useful tools that I know of:

  • The official WP documentation on writing a plugin is good for learning about plugin manifests as well as a top-level overview of the aspects of plugin development.
  • The official Plugin API page is also a good starting point. It explains WP’s hook system, which is the foundation for plugin development.
  • Pippin Williamson has written a series called Plugin Development 101 that features a set of video tutorials on common plugin development techniques. Costs a couple bucks, but Pippin is a smart dude and I’m sure the videos are a really good way to get started.
  • There are a couple of tools that can be used to generate boilerplate and basic file setup for plugins. The ones I know of are https://github.com/tommcfarlin/WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate and the wp scaffold plugin command in WP-CLI.
  • The book Professional WordPress Plugin Development is very solid, and a good investment for those who like to learn this kinda stuff through books.

My #1 piece of advice to people getting started with WP plugin development is to find a plugin that does something sorta like what they are trying to do and to reverse engineer it. For me, this is far faster and more practical than any hello-world tutorial or sequential set of lessons. YMMV.

If anyone has other suggestions, please feel free to add them in the comments.

WP-CLI tools for BuddyPress

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I think we can all agree that WP-CLI is the cat’s pajamas. Starting today, I’ll be maintaining a small (but growing) library of BuddyPress commands for WP-CLI: wp-cli-buddypress. Available commands are currently quite meager (and quite biased toward my needs as a developer rather than a site admin), but I’ll be building more, and would be delighted to receive pull requests.

Anthologize automated tests now run using WP’s unit test suite

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Anthologize, I haven’t forgotten about you! I have some very cool stuff in the works, but for now, a quick update on the progress of the campaign-funded work.

Back in 2011, Patrick Murray-John added some unit tests to Anthologize, covering a number of public methods in the TeiApi class. A number of the major refactoring jobs I’m currently undertaking will require additional test coverage, but they are (unlike TeiApi) dependent on WordPress being initalized. So I’ve migrated Anthologize’s tests to use the WP test suite. I’ve used the scaffold provided by the dope and phatte wp-cli (incidentally, I hope that their scaffold becomes the de facto standard for WP plugin tests).

This change means that, in addition to requiring PHPUnit, you’ll also need to have the WP test suite installed. You can install it manually, but I recommend using wp-cli to get the job done in just a command or two. In brief:


$ wp core init-tests /path/to/wp-tests --dbname=wp_test --dbuser=root --dbpass=asd
$ mysql -u'root' -p'asd' -e 'CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS wp_test'

To run the tests,


$ cd /path/to/wp/wp-content/plugins/anthologize
$ WP_TESTS_DIR=~/path/to/wp-tests phpunit

You can define WP_TESTS_DIR in your .bashrc file for quicker use in the future.

This post is brought to you by Anthologize campaign supporter Demokratie & Dialog. D&D, a Major Sponsor of Anthologize (woo hoo!), is using WordPress and BuddyPress in amazing ways both to study the way that government policy affects youth and to get youth themselves involved in the development of said policy. I had a chance to get to know the very excellent Andreas Karsten of D&D at BuddyCamp Vancouver last year, and we have big plans to start a BuddyPress jazz band. Many thanks for your support of WP, BP, and Anthologize!