Roll Back a Plugin or Theme Using WP-CLI

Reading Time: 2 minutesWP-CLI makes it very easy to rollback plugins and themes as well as update plugins and themes on sites all from command line. This is useful if you see your site is broken by a newer version of the theme or plugin. In this article, we’ll be running through some valuable commands for rolling back your site. If you need to rollback a plugin on a site to a previous version, you can find the previous version number from the development tab of the plugins listed on WordPress.org. To find the slug of the plugin, you will need to go to the WordPress.org plugins. In the case of Contact Form 7, the plugin slug is contact-form-7.

Note:

You can also find the plugin or theme slug by going to your WordPress files and typing in: wp plugin list wp theme list

Pre-flight

WP-CLI must be installed

Rollback a Plugin to a Previous Version

If you need to test that the command is correct, you can always use the flag –dry-run at the end of the command: wp plugin update contact-form-7 --version=5.0.5 --dry-run In the following example, to rollback Contact Form 7, you can use this command: wp plugin update contact-form-7 --version=5.0.5

Activate A Particular Version of a Plugin

If you need to install and activate a previous version of a plugin, run: wp plugin install contact-form-7 --version=5.0.5 --activate --force

Update All Plugins

If the plugins you updated have been fixed and you now need to update all plugins, the example command is: wp plugin update --all Excluding A Plugin If you want to update all plugins, but need to exclude a specific plugin (in this case WooCommerce), run command: wp plugin update --all --exclude=woocommerce

Rollback a Theme to a Previous Version

If you did need to rollback a parent theme to a previous version, you could use this command example which would rollback the Storefront theme to version 2.4.0: wp theme update storefront --version=2.4.0

Update Theme to Current Version Release

If you know wanted to update the Storefront theme on a site to the most current version, you could use this command example; wp theme update storefront Using a mix of these WP-CLI commands will enable you to easily rollback a plugin on your site, rollback a theme, or update all plugins. It will also update all plugins, but exclude a specific plugin from being updated. Our Managed WordPress product comes with WP-CLI installed along with easy, automatic updates. Check out how our Managed WordPress platform can streamline your work today!