I’ve become a big fan of LocalWP (formerly Local by Flywheel) for local WordPress development (i.e. running websites on my Mac). One thing I do find frustrating is the need to use “Open Site Shell” when I want to run a WP-CLI command.
If you’re in a hurry to set this up, you can jump to the Quick Setup below.
Configure WP-CLI to work without “Open Site Shell”
The key to making this work is adding two files wp-cli.local.yml
and wp-cli.local.php
.
Where to Add These Files
Both of these files go in the project root directory. The project root directory for the website contains three folders (/app
, /conf
, and /logs
) by default. Your two new files with be alongside these directories.
What Goes In These Files
wp-cli.local.yml
path: app/public
require:
- wp-cli.local.php
wp-cli.local.php
The contents of wp-cli.local.php
will vary for each Local site. The information you will need can be found in the LocalWP dashboard for your site under the heading DATABASE. We are looking for the Socket
value.
In my screenshot the Socket
value is: /Users/sal/Library/Application Support/Local/run/lBW9-Gu_J/mysql/mysqld.sock
We combine this Socket value with local:
, to define the DB_HOST
value in the file wp-cli.local.php
<?php
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost:/Users/sal/Library/Application Support/Local/run/lBW9-Gu_J/mysql/mysqld.sock');
// Only display fatal run-time errors.
// See http://php.net/manual/en/errorfunc.constants.php.
error_reporting(E_ERROR);
// Disable WordPress debug mode.
// See https://codex.wordpress.org/WP_DEBUG.
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
Confirm WP-CLI Works
To confirm everything is setup correctly from the command line (on your Mac, without using “Open Site Shell”) run:
$ wp option get siteurl
and if everything is working properly, you’ll get back the URL for your website.
Troubleshooting
My most common error at this point is forgetting to have the website running in the LocalWP Dashboard. We can’t use WP-CLI with the site, if the site is not running.
If you get a response like “command not found: wp”, then you likely need to install WP-CLI.
How Does this Work?
WP-CLI checks for config files named wp-cli.local.yml
or wp-cli.yml
inside the current working directory (or upwards).
By adding our wp-cli.local.yml
to the project root, any command run anywhere inside the project will use our wp-cli.local.yml
configuration (WP-CLI config documentation).
wp-cli.local.yml
We define the path
to the WordPress install in relation to wp-cli.local.yml
and we require the file wp-cli.local.php
be run before any of the WordPress files.
wp-cli.local.php
We override the DB_HOST
database connection value defined in wp-config.php
to include the database socket specific to our site. Since our database connection information is set before wp-config.php
, our information is used. Since WordPress tries to set these constants after they are already set, PHP throws notices. To suppress these notices we set PHP to only display fatal run-time errors.
Other Methods to Setup
Quick Setup
Run this command from the the project root directory of the site.
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/salcode/wpcli-localwp-setup/main/wpcli-localwp-setup && bash wpcli-localwp-setup && rm -rf ./wpcli-localwp-setup
Running the following at the command line will:
- download a bash script to create the two files (
wp-cli.local.yml
andwp-cli.local.php
) - run the bash script (you’ll be prompted for the Database
socket
value, which can be found on the Database tab of the site in LocalWP) - delete the bash script, leaving the two new files behind
The Quick Setup files come from my salcode/wpcli-localwp-setup project.
Thank You
Thanks to my employer WebDevStudios who provides weekly time when our programmers can gather and chat about technology and bounce around ideas. The updates to make this compatible with LocalWP (instead of the old Local by Flywheel) came out of one of those meetings. Particular thanks to my co-workers Aubrey Portwood, Richard Aber, Ashar Irfan, and Justin Foell for all their input and solutions to problems I couldn’t figure out.
In addition to providing invaluable time for programmers to chat and bounce around ideas, WebDevStudios also sets aside time for Five for the Future, which is dedicated time for us to give back to the open source community. Some of this time I used to put together this information.
This project was originally inspired by Morgan Estes’s work with his project BigWing/Local-WP-CLI.
Thanks to Justin Sternberg for sharing his similar quick setup in his Dot-Files.
Good Article! But there is a big problem:
When I hit “wp option get siteurl” in console it works fine… but have you ever tried to hit ” wp db export ” ? It will refuse the connection: “mysqldump: Got error: 2013: Lost connection to MySQL server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 0 when trying to connect”
Do you have any solution for that?
Hi Kevin,
Glad you’re finding this useful. I’m not sure about the problem you’re seeing, if I run
it runs successfully and I get a file like
local-2018-08-14-715f4c0.sql
in my local directory.If I were troubleshooting the problem you described, as a next step I’d use the Local by Flywheel “Open Site SSH” and then try
wp db export
from there.Sorry I don’t have an answer. Good luck and if you get things sorted, I’d love to hear about how you got it to work.
That solved all my issues. Thank you!
Do you have an update for this article for Local 5.2.8.
Thanks
[Note: Clifton included a video clip that further explained that using the new Local Lightning, there is no remote host nor remote port under the database settings.]
Thanks for the comment Clifton. I’ve not yet upgraded to Local Lightning, so I’m not familiar with what settings are needed there. At this point, I don’t have a timeline for making the update. If anyone else reading this has any resources to share, please feel free.
I’ve also added a note to the top of the article, explaining that these steps do not apply for Local Lightning.
Cool, but I ran the terminal command and clicked through the database host and database port settings without checking them. Now I get a message that I have to check the database settings.
How can I do that?
Thanks!
Handy! Thanks for writing this.
Thanks Sal, this worked perfectly first time.
I’ve been having issues connecting to Algolia from WP CLI within Local but after many hours and finally finding your article I’ve been able to connect using WP CLI from outside the Local site.
Thank you so much.