How to Add WP-CLI to All Users in CloudPanel v2.

What is WP-CLI and why do I need it?

You don’t need WP-CLI to run a WordPress site but,

WP-CLI is WordPress deployed from the command line and mainly used for headless admin installs but everything you can do with regular WordPress you can do with WP-CLI.

WP-CLI It works great as a REST API interface especially since you don’t need a frontend, which we all know is notoriously sluggish without some fine-tuning.

You can use WP-CLI to install WordPress without a frontend, then use a much faster static site frontend generator like Gatsby for blazing fast speeds.

Installing WP-CLI on CloudPanel.

To install WP-CLI on CloudPanel first we need to create a sudo user. This is different from adding users through the admin > users section on CloudPanel (this is to add users that can log into the control panel via HTTPS).

First, we will need to log in as root to add the user and set the permissions.

Log into SSH as root.

ssh root@CloudPanelServerIpAddress

Once logged in we can add the user and give them sudo privileges with the following two commands.

adduser wpcli-user
usermod -aG sudo wpcli-user

Now we can log out of root and log back in with the new user.

Once logged in as your newly created non root sudo user use curl to download WP-CLI.

Downloading WP-CLI.

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

You can check it works with.

php wp-cli.phar --info

Mark executable & move to PATH.

Now we need to mark the file executable and move it to somewhere within your path.

chmod +x wp-cli.phar
sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

Let’s check it’s all working as intended.

wp cli info

You should get some information back similar to below.

wpcli-user@cp:~$ wp cli info
OS:     Linux 5.10.0-16-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.127-2 (2022-07-23) x86_64
Shell:  /bin/bash
PHP binary:     /usr/bin/php8.1
PHP version:    8.1.8
php.ini used:   /etc/php/8.1/cli/php.ini
MySQL binary:   /usr/bin/mysql
MySQL version:  mysql  Ver 8.0.27-18 for Linux on x86_64 (Percona Server (GPL), Release '@@PERCONA_VERSION_EXTRA@@', Revision '@@REVISION@@')
SQL modes:
WP-CLI root dir:        phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli
WP-CLI vendor dir:      phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor
WP_CLI phar path:       /home/wpcli-user
WP-CLI packages dir:
WP-CLI global config:
WP-CLI project config:
WP-CLI version: 2.6.0

What about other users?

You should now be able to log out with your sudo user and log back in with any other user that doesn’t have sudo privileges and still be able to use the wp cli info command. This shows us that WP-CLI is working as intended.

Setting up your first project.

The following command will download, install and set up your first admin WordPress user.

wp core install --url=wpcli-test.dazeb.dev --title="Your Blog Title" --admin_name=ADMINLOGIN --admin_password=ADMINPASSWORD --admin_email=admin@dazeb.xyz

Just be sure to change the ADMINLOGIN, ADMINPASSWORD, --url and --title and --admin_email.

Complete!

You have now enabled and installed WordPress via the WP-CLI!

Check out some more commands in the documentation or see how to install plugins and create posts.