The first thing you will want to do is decide on which stack you will be using for your local development or to determine if you have ssh access to your hosting account. I work on a Mac so I recommend working with MAMP or AMPPS. I’ve also done some work using Devilbox and Docker but it seems to be a bit more intensive to setup and we will save that for another day.
There is only limited support for the Windows environment so I might recommend working with a virtual box/VM to install Linux or the like.
Installation
The command you will run will download the wp-cli.phar file to your current working directory. Anywhere is fine as we will be moving it.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
Now we will check the wp-cli.phar to ensure it is working and to make sure PHP is working.
php wp-cli.phar --info
To make the process easier to use as we move forward, we will want to make it executable and add the wp-cli.phar file to our PATH.
chmod +x wp-cli.phar sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp
You can now use “wp” in your command line instead of typing php wp-cli.phar for each command. To test that it is setup correctly you can run the following command and you should see something similar.
wp --info OS: Darwin 18.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 18.2.0: Thu Dec 20 20:46:53 PST 2018; root:xnu-4903.241.1~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64 Shell: /bin/zsh PHP binary: /usr/bin/php PHP version: 7.1.23 php.ini used: WP-CLI root dir: phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli WP-CLI vendor dir: phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor WP_CLI phar path: /Users/christoph WP-CLI packages dir: WP-CLI global config: WP-CLI project config: WP-CLI version: 2.1.0
Updating
It’s easy to update the WP-CLI as necessary with the following command.
wp cli update
Or
sudo wp cli update
Conclusion
You can now use the WP-CLI in your workflow and feel free to reference https://wp-cli.org/ for any additional information about setting up the WP-CLI. Keep a look out for our next article in the series where well will take a look at the list of commands available in the WP-CLI. As always let us know if you have any questions in the comments below!
