One problem is that I need to install WP-CLI on the new server, and dealing with it is not easy.
The installation instructions don’t say one way or another, but WP-CLI should not be installed as root. Later, if you go to run it as root, it will bark at you that you’re doing a bad thing. Okay, nice to know.
But we do now have the problem that the user who runs WordPress (well, Apache, which runs the PHP code that is WordPress) is the www-data user. I cannot log in as the www-data user, by design (it is a good design). So, how to run this WP-CLI stuff?
sudo -u www-data wp <command>
Okay, this says to switch to user www-data (sudo = switch user and do) (the -u option specifies which user, in this case www-data), and run the wp binary and any command line options you want it (wp) to do.
Cool, but the user I’m logged in as has no idea of where the WordPress installation is. So now, every freaking command I have to type, sudo -u www-data wp <command>, also needs --path=/var/www/html/wordpress in there too.
This sucks.
There is supposed to be a file, wp-cli.local.yml, that I can put the path into. But that file is in my directory, and the sudo command switches away from that.
This sucks, still.
The www-data user does have a home directory; but, it won’t ever be used because the account runs /usr/sbin/nologin on every access. That is secure, but it doesn’t help me from having to type sudo -u www-data wp every freaking time I need to do something.--path=/var/www/html/wordpress<command>
Also, I am a fan of using the page-up key to search my bash history. That works great when I type a few letters, say gre and hit PgUp to search through my last few grep commands. Do I need to reassign ownership of files I’ve added to /var/www/html/wordpress/ ? chow and PgUp, and in a keystroke or two, I’ve got chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wordpress/ ready to run. Ditto the Apache2 enable and disable site commands. There are a ton of examples where just a few keystrokes and the PgUp key are great.
But having to type su and hitting PgUp presents me with a wall of noise, to finally find the command at the end that I actually want to repeat.
This sucks.
So, there is a solution. It seems kludgy, but it works, as long as you are willing to put up with its kludginess.
cdto /var/www/html/wordpress/- create a file, wp-cli.local.yml, in the location where WordPress is installed (where you just did the cd to), and inside it, put:
- path: /var/www/html/wordpress
So, as long as you are already in the “right” place, and you have this file which points to your “right place”, you don’t have to specify the “right place” on the command-line of WP-CLI.
The other option is to be in my home directory, and do everything via bash scripts. I wanted to use the command-line, but I may need to put one more level of indirection in the process to get things to work easily. Like I said: kludge.
However, since the bash script has WPPATH="/var/www/html/wordpress" in it, all that sudo -u www-data nonsense goes away. Sure, I’m running it as some random user from some random location, but (I assume) that the WP-CLI people are just fine with that because if a random hacker gets into an ssh session on my box, I’m done for, anyway. Why not just assume whoever is running these commands is authorized?
This sucks quite a bit less, although it doesn’t make me warm and fuzzy about security.