Seamlessly run WP-CLI commands on a remote server via SSH
WP-CLI is an extremely useful tool for managing WordPress installs, but it requires you to invoke it on the same server where WordPress is installed. This means you have to SSH into the server, navigate to the install, and then run the command. It would be much more convenient if you could remain on your local shell and invoke WP-CLI remotely; this is especially the case when using Vagrant.
The WP-CLI SSH script is also TTY-aware, so if you try piping the results of a WP-CLI SSH command to another program, it will return the machine-formatted output (e.g. no colors or table cells).
Assuming you have a clone of your WordPress install on your machine, add an ssh
section
to your wp-cli.yml
config file. In this section you define the remote servers which
host the other environments for your site, e.g. vagrant
, staging
, and production
.
Then you just invoke WP-CLI normally, but supply an additional --host
argument with
host you want to connect to:
wp ssh plugin status --host=production
You can also provide Bash aliases to supply this argument by default:
alias wp="wp ssh --host=vagrant"
alias wpprod="wp ssh --host=production"
Add an ssh
section to your wp-cli.yml
/wp-cli.local.yml
, as seen in the sample config.
You indicate the ssh
command templates for each host you want to connect to. The template variable %cmd%
is
replaced with the full command to run on the server; the %pseudotty%
template variable is replaced
with -t
/-T
depending on whether you're on a TTY or piping the command output.
For a step-by-step guide, please refer to the wiki.
Note that you do not necessarily need WP-CLI installed on your server to use this. If the wp
command is not
recognized on the server, the script will download the wp-cli.phar
file and use that at runtime.
Installing WP-CLI-SSH on your machine can be done either by installation as a Composer package,
or by adding a require
config to a wp-cli.local.yml
.
For global composer installation:
composer global require x-team/wp-cli-ssh dev-master