Shawn Hooper’s got a great new article up about running WP-CLI commands on a remote server. At first, based on his title, I worried the answer was “there’s this thing called SSH…” But my worry was unnecessary. This is not an article about the hot technology of SSH, or at least not exclusively. (I really shouldn’t have worried me. I’ve seen Shawn give talks, and he’s no slouch on the expertise side.)

Last night, inspired partly by David’s recent Quick Guide, I migrated an existing WordPress site’s 180MB filesystem onto a new SiteGround hosting account in about five minutes.

There are lots of ways to migrate a WordPress site. Lots of plugins can do it. You can do it over simple (S)FTP. But the quickest way I know of is via rsync and WP-CLI. But that does come with an important proviso: you need to have access to a shell (via a simple local terminal or SSH) to both ends of the migration. And that’s often harder to do than the plugin or SFTP route. But if you’ve got that, this way is a great deal faster.

When we think about “using a computer,” we usually think in terms of graphical user interfaces, or GUIs: interfaces (like Microsoft Word, the Mac OS, or the WordPress admin interface) that are specially and attractively designed, that have programs and windows and tabs that visibly open and close, and that let you click things and drag things and drop things and hover things.

I’ve been writing a lot about WP-CLI. There are reasons for that. But the most important is that it’s really cool, and the primary maintainer, Daniel Bachhuber, is doing a great job making the tool better and keeping it healthy. (He’s also, nicely, lowered its bus-factor recently.)

To some, WP-CLI might seem like a nice but optional convenience for a WordPress developer who’s comfortable with the command line. For developers who’ve dealt with time-out issues in PHP processes, or who administer lots of websites, WP-CLI is more than that: it’s a time-saver and power-tool.

Just yesterday I watched this great talk from Steve Grunwell (who I had the pleasure of meeting at Lone Star PHP 2017) about WP-CLI commands. It’s from Loopconf 2.1. It’s a very good talk about the how, what, and why of making your own commands. If you’ve ever thought about writing WP-CLI commands, or just wondered how they work internally, he does a great job summarizing all of that and more. Here it is inline:

If you’ve been to a WordCamp or two, chances are good that you’ve heard of the existence of a thing called “WP CLI.” Maybe that’s all you know. Maybe you’ve used it. Maybe you have a sinking feeling of guilt when you hear that name because you feel like you should have used it by now. Whatever the case, this article will tell you what WP-CLI is, how you get it, and why you might want to.

We’ve written a number of recent articles about how to do various things on the Unix command line. The highlight articles are: