Advanced usage

Automation

VIP-CLI can be used for automating common flows and tasks for your team both locally and in CI contexts (e.g. triggering Data Sync on a schedule; running WP-CLI commands across all environments). To do this, you can bypass the authentication prompt by creating a config file.

First, generate a new token from the VIP Dashboard (click on “Set up CLI”). Then create a file called ~/.config/configstore/vip-go-cli.json with the following:

{
  "vip-go-cli": "{YOUR-TOKEN-GOES-HERE}"
}

If the token is valid, you should now be able to run vip app list or any other authenticated commands.

Note: For any automation, we highly recommend setting up a bot/machine user and generating a token using that account.

Skipping command confirmation

When trying to run a command on a production environment, we prompt you to confirm your actions. If you want to skip this confirmation step (e.g. using the command as part of a script), you can bypass it by passing the --yes (or -y) flag before the wp command.

Example commands on this page include wpvip as the alias of the app and develop as the app environment:

$ vip @wpvip.develop --yes -- wp option get siteurl

For nested commands run on a production environment, this flag is required in both inner and outer commands. See the Nested Commands section below for more information.

Referencing a file input

To reference an input file in your command, commit it to a publically accessible location within your GitHub repository. For example, within either your themes or plugins folder. You can then reference the path of the file via /var/www/wp-content/<path to file>.

Writing command output to a file

All WP-CLI commands are run on a remote web server. Any file operations during a command will occur on the remote server as well with no way to retrieve the file.

If you do need to write to a file, we suggest writing the output to the console first (using helpers like WP_CLI::line() and WP_CLI::log()) and then redirecting it to your desired file:

$ vip @wpvip.develop --yes -- wp option get siteurl > output.txt

Nested commands

When running more complex WP-CLI commands such as loops or nested commands, you need to ensure that each reference to wp uses the remote execution pattern:

❌ This will not work:

$ vip @wpvip.develop -- wp post delete $(wp post list --post_type='page' --format=ids)
-bash: xyz: command not found

This is actually two commands, (1) a post list that retrieves a list of ids that is then (2) passed into a delete command. This will not work as intended because the command inside the $() is referencing the local version of wp (i.e. on your computer).

At best, a message will appear indicating  wp doesn’t exist locally. At worst, if run from a local WordPress site directory, it will get post_ids from the local WordPress site that will then be passed to the delete command to be run against the remote site.

✅ This will work:

$ vip @wpvip.develop -- wp post delete $(vip @wpvip.develop -- wp post list --post_type='page' --format=ids)

For production environments, you’ll need to include the --yes flag in both inner and outer commands to bypass the confirmations prompts and execute the commands:

$ vip @wpvip.production --yes -- wp post delete $(vip @wpvip.production --yes -- wp post list --post_type='page' --format=ids)

Looping

Due to the way that shell utilities handle stdin, commands like xargs may not always work with WP-CLI as expected. In these cases it might be easier to write the commands to a file and then execute that file.

❌ This will not work:

$ vip @wpvip.develop -- wp post list --fields=ID --format=csv --posts_per_page=5 | xargs -I % 'vip @wpvip.develop -- wp post update % --post_category=NewCategory '

✅ This will work:

$ vip @wpvip.develop -- wp post list --fields=ID --format=csv --posts_per_page=5 | xargs -I % sh -c 'echo "vip @wpvip.develop -- wp post update % --post_category=NewCategory" >> commands.sh '
$ chmod +x commands.sh
$ ./commands.sh