Reading Time: 2 minutesWP-CLI is a very handy set of commands. You can run anything that you would run in wp-admin on a WordPress site but from the command line. Useful commands which WP-CLI employs to keep WordPress core updated plugins including the default themes which come with WordPress.
To run WP-CLI on
Managed WordPress or
Managed WooCommerce, you would need to obtain the
SSH creds from the manager, by using the terminal or a command line program like
Putty. You’ll then log in and change the home to HTML (which is where WordPress is installed). You have to be in this folder for WP-CLI to work.
cd html
Updating WordPress using WP-CLI
To update WordPress to the most current version, you can run this command, where you would replace out the
X value with the current
version number or WordPress.
wp core update --version=5.0.x --force
To update WordPress to the most current version which is 5.0.3, run this command:
wp core update --version=5.0.3 --force
When WordPress 5.1 is released in February 2019, the command will be:
wp core update --version=5.1 --force
If an error does show whilst running the wp core update command (e.g., a WordPress update is already in progress in the terminal), a lock option value might be set. You can delete that option value by using this command:
wp option delete core_updater.lock
Version of WordPress using WP-CLI
To verify the version of WordPress that is installed, you can run this command:
wp core version
Updating Themes Using WP-CLI
Once you have updated WordPress, that will mean the default themes need to be updated as well. You can update those themes by using this command:
wp theme update twentysixteen twentyseventeen twentynineteen
In the previous command example, the themes updated would be
Twenty Sixteen,
Twenty Seventeen, and
Twenty Nineteen.
Updating Plugins Using WP-CLI
If
Akismet or
Jetpack plugins are installed, you can update those two plugins by running either of the following commands:
wp plugin update akismet
wp plugin update jetpack
You can alternatively update both plugins from one command using:
wp plugin update akismet jetpack
Install Classic Editor using WP-CLI
If the site was on an older version of WordPress (such as 4.9.9) and you were updating to 5.0.3, but you wanted to keep using the classic editor and not the new default Gutenberg block editor, you can install and activate either the
Classic Editor or
Disable Gutenberg plugins.
To install and activate the Classic Editor plugin, you can run this command:
wp plugin install classic-editor --activate
To install and activate the Disable Gutenberg plugin, use:
wp plugin install disable-gutenberg --activate
Using these commands in
WP-CLI will make it easier to update WordPress, themes, plugins, and help you to install plugins from the command line without having to update from wp-admin.
Managed WordPress and
Managed WooCommerce will automatically update WordPress core, plugins and themes which are on WordPress.org.
