WP-CLI Sync

A WP-CLI command for syncing a remote site to a local environment

Requirements

• A WordPress installation using .env for environment variables
• SSH connection to remote server
• WP-CLI
• rsync

Installation

1. Require the plugin by running:

composer require jonbp/wp-cli-sync

2. Add the following to your .env file (don't forget .env.example for reference 😉):

# WP-CLI Sync Settings [wp sync]
REMOTE_SSH_USERNAME=""
REMOTE_SSH_HOSTNAME=""
REMOTE_PROJECT_DIR="~/gitrepo" # No trailing slashes
REMOTE_UPLOAD_DIR="~/gitrepo" # No trailing slashes

If you need to specify a port for the connection, you can specify it:

```sh
REMOTE_PORT=""

If you want to be able to sync from additional environments (e.g. a remote development site), add additional environment variables for your remote install with the suffix _ENVIRONMENT.

REMOTE_SSH_USERNAME_DEV=""
REMOTE_SSH_HOSTNAME_DEV=""
REMOTE_PROJECT_DIR_DEV=""
REMOTE_UPLOAD_DIR_DEV=""

3. Run wp sync from the project root. If you configured additional remote environments in step 2, you can pass a single argument to sync with that environment instead. E.g. wp sync dev.

Plugins should be formatted in a comma seperated format

For example: "plugin1,plugin2,plugin3"

Plugins activated on sync

LOCAL_ACTIVATED_PLUGINS=""

Plugins deactivated on sync

LOCAL_DEACTIVATED_PLUGINS=""

Dirs to exclude from sync

Multiple dirs can be provided by separating with a comma

Use dir names or paths relative to uploads dir

LOCAL_SYNC_DIR_EXCLUDES=""

DB Queries to run after sync

LOCAL_POST_SYNC_QUERIES=""

First Sync

You may find yourself working on a bedrock project that already exists on a production server and you don't have the database setup locally yet. Running wp sync in the project will fail in this case as it requires an active WordPress installation to run.

To remedy this, you can run the following commands to create a database (if necessary) and create a basic installation inside that database in order to run the plugin and its first sync.

wp db create
wp core install --url=abc.xyz --title=abc --admin_user=abc --admin_password=abc --admin_email=abc@abc.xyz --skip-email

It’s not necessary to edit the variables on the second line as the database is overwritten by the plugin during sync. The code is simply to give the plugin the requirements it needs to run without the real database installed.