Category: TIL

If you use WP-cli command on a multisite it be default will only run on the mainsite.
But often you want to change a setting for all the sites.
In my case I wanted to set the timezone to Amsterdam for the whole network. That’s not hard:

wp option set timezone_string 'Europe/Amsterdam'

On a multisite this is a bit more difficult. But the script below will do the same for each site in a multisite.

wp site list --field=url | xargs -I % sh -c 'printf "SITE: %\n"; wp option set timezone_string 'Europe/Amsterdam' --url=%'

It consists of 3 parts.
First create a list of all site url’s

wp site list --field=url

Secondly we pass that on to xargs.
xargs is a very powerfull tool. One that I hardly understand and should go into deeper one day.
This is the best tutorial I found if you want to start with xargs.

The only thing important now is the -I %. This sets the variable to %.
But the most important thing here is that inside the '***' You can run any command. like normal.

xargs -I % sh -c '***'

Which brings us to the final part.
First print the site url on a line, then do the actual command we want to do on each sub site. As you can see we pass on the --url=% where we set the variable given in xargs.

printf "SITE: %\n"; wp option set timezone_string 'Europe/Amsterdam' --url=%

Update VVV 3.0

As of the release of VVV 3.0 this can all be done by adding the following in the vvv-custom.yml

general:
  # Backup the databases to the database/backups subfolder on halt/suspend/destroy, set to false to disable
  db_backup: false
  # Import the databases if they're missing from backups
  db_restore: false

Pre VVV 3.0

VVV is great but if you have 20+ sites in it most of which are quite big doing a reload or halt can be quite slow.
Disabling it isn’t the easiest. In vagrant-root/config/homebin/ create these 3 files:

• vagrant_destroy_custom
• vagrant_halt_custom
• vagrant_suspend_custom

I wish there was a way to easily disable these. The vvv-custom.yml would be great for this.
Also adding a way to exclude specific databases.

source

The php function array_splice can be used to insert new items. At specific places.

<?php
$breadcrumbs = [
    'home',
    'year',
    'month',
    'day',
];
$new_crumb = [
    'category'
];
array_splice($breadcrumbs, 1, 0, $new_crumb);

The result is that category is inserted at the second place.

<?php
array (
    0 => 'home',
    1 => 'category',
    2 => 'year',
    3 => 'month',
    4 => 'day',
);

This is one of those “I know this is possible, but don’t know how”.

php -r '$parts = [ "hello", "world" ]; echo implode( " ", $parts ) . PHP_EOL;' # hello world

Only useful for simple onelines. You’re very likely to be better of putting code in a php file and run that script like:

php ./helloworld.php

Run PHP with WordPress loaded.

Of course your good old friend wp-cli can help.
It can run code with wp fully loaded. So if you add things in the init action or even after the wp_loaded, those plugin/theme functions, posttypes and such are all available.

First off the plain php code execution, with wp eval

wp eval 'var_dump(did_action( "wp_loaded" ));'  # int(1)

Secondly we execute a file with WordPress fully loaded using wp eval-file

wp eval-file ./helloworld.php

A lot of usefull informatoin can be caught using curl. Formating the output can be done with the -w --write-out argument

curl -w 'Home loadtime: %{time_total}nResponse code: %{http_code}n' -o /dev/null -s 'https://janw.me/'

Output example:

This example will show the load time and response code. These 2 values are duable. But If you want more it’s more readable to pass a file.

In file: nano curlformat.txt

    time_namelookup:  %{time_namelookup}n
       time_connect:  %{time_connect}n
    time_appconnect:  %{time_appconnect}n
   time_pretransfer:  %{time_pretransfer}n
      time_redirect:  %{time_redirect}n
 time_starttransfer:  %{time_starttransfer}n
                    ----------n
         time_total:  %{time_total}n

Then pass the file to curl:

curl -w "@curl-format.txt" -o /dev/null -s "https://janw.me/"

A list of all avialable variables are in the man pages

Sources:

• https://blog.josephscott.org/2011/10/14/timing-details-with-curl/
• https://linux.die.net/man/1/curl

The php manual says enough. Still I didn’t realize this and got stommed on this one far too long.

auto_append_file string

Note: If the script is terminated with exit(), auto-append will not occur.

exit() & die() do the same thing.

We where asked to host a site. But then it turned out that site was part of a bigger multisite. So after I got all files & db of the complete site I needed to clean it up and only keep the requested site left.

The quick and dirty steps:

• Don’t change the DNS until you’re done testing.

Webhosting settings

• Import all files on the server
• Import the database and change the db settings in wp-config.php.
• Locally add the domain to the hosts file So I didn’t need to change urls
• delete all sites using wp site delete SITE_ID
• Only keep site 1 (the primary you can’t delete) and site 12 (the site ID I needed)

Rename the tables

• Rename the site 1 tables in mysql RENAME TABLE `amsterda_db`.`wp_links` TO `amsterda_db`.`wp_BACKUP_links`;
• Rename the site 12 tables to the normal tables RENAME TABLE `amsterda_db`.`wp_12_links` TO `amsterda_db`.`wp_links`;
• Make sure you only rename the site tables, don’t rename wp_blogs and other multisite tables

Update the url

• In wp_blogs delete the record of site 12 and change the name to the new main site in wp_blogs.domain. And rename the url inside wp_site.
• Also cleanup the wp_blog_versions.
• In wp-config.php change the constant DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE
• Search the database for all mentions of the old mainsite. This is a per case check what should be done.
  Links in posts are probably fine. The old url in the wp_options maybe not.

Permissions and roles

• In the wp_options table search for wp_user_roles as option_name. If this record is not present. Search it in the wp_BACKUP_options and create the record manually.
• Permissions are still set for site 12 fix that using wp search-replace wp_12_ wp_ wp_usermeta

Test

• Test your site. At least test uploads, permalinks, creating/updating pages
• The normal steps usually when deploying a new site.
• Think about things that might differ on this inherent setup.

Live

• switch DNS
• SSL

After the first week

• Delete all wp_BACKUP_* tables
• Check for unneeded plugins
• Check for unneeded users.
• Possible you should cleanup the uploads folder of old sites, although there may be links to those uploads.

Of course it would be even better to remove the multisite setup. But I was out of time. And I still would have done these steps first.

In interfaces you can force the return type

<?php
interface InterfaceTest {
    function GetSingleEntity(): Entity;
    function GetEntitySet() : Entity[];
}

GetEntitySet should return a array containing Entities. But this kind of syntax is not allowed.
You could just change it to only return an array, but the forcing of the class is the most powerful.
The best is to create a wrapper class for the entities, best would be to use an Iterator.

sed is not new for me. But it’s such a versatile tool. And I always have trouble finding the precice syntax I need. So here is a collection of examples. It probably will grow in the years.

Replace the home dir with ~.

COMPACT=$(echo ${HOME} | sed "s#${HOME}#~#g")

Replace %SALT% with the variable $SALT in the file wp-config.php

sed -i -E "s/%SALT%/${SALT}/g"  "wp-config.php"

Today -after a very frustrating hour- I found out git checks for .gitignore inside folders.

Folder tree example

• .git (the root)
• .gitignore
• wp-content
  • themes
    • project
    • .gitignore (git also checks this one)