SYNOPSIS

# simple installation from CPAN
cpanm App::WordPressTools

# view usage information
wp-tools --help

# common usage
wp-tools upgrade|backup|restore OPTIONS...

DESCRIPTION

WordPress Tools is a set of tools that allow you to backup, restore, and upgrade WordPress sites. The tools are especially useful for upgrading very outdated sites and for scripting the backing up and upgrading of many sites.

WordPress Tools was built to make the Internet more secure. A huge number of websites on the Internet use WordPress, because it’s awesome, but a large portion of those sites do not run the latest version of WordPress which makes them susceptible to hacking. WordPress Tools can be used to get those sites up-to-date again, and that makes the whole Internet more secure.

The code has been used in production and has already upgraded over two million WordPress sites, but it has little real-world testing outside of Linux at this point so your mileage may vary if you have a different operating system. Stay tuned as we add support for more platforms, and please contribute if you feel like it.

The command-line program also has a lot of options for managing server load, so you can upgrade your sites without killing your server.

INSTALLATION

There are several ways to install WordPress Tools to your system.

Make sure you have WP-CLI and the other DEPENDENCIES installed.

Using cpanm

The easiest way to install WordPress Tools is using cpanm. If you have a local perl (plenv, perlbrew, etc.), you can just do:

cpanm App::WordPressTools

to install the wp-tools executable and its dependencies. The executable will be installed to your perl’s bin path, like ~/perl5/perlbrew/bin/wp-tools.

If you’re installing to your system perl, you can do:

cpanm --sudo App::WordPressTools

to install the wp-tools executable to a system directory, like /usr/local/bin/wp-tools (depending on your perl).

Downloading just the executable

If you want to handle the Perl dependencies yourself and just want the wp-tools executable, you can do:

curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bluehost/wp-tools/solo/wp-tools
chmod +x wp-tools

to download the wp-tools executable to your current directory.

For developers

If you’re a developer and want to hack on the source, clone the repository and pull the dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/bluehost/wp-tools.git
cd wp-tools
cpanm Dist::Zilla
dzil authordeps --missing | cpanm
dzil listdeps --author --develop --missing | cpanm

DEPENDENCIES

WordPress Tools requires these other programs and libraries in order to do its work. You probably have most of these on your system already, and the cpanm method of installing wp-tools will handle the Perl module dependencies for you.

WP-CLI
GNU Coreutils
GNU Tar
awk
grep
mysql (MySQL server client)
procps
Various Perl modules (see the distributed cpanfile file for a list)

OPTIONS

–help

Show usage information and exit.
–force

If there are any resource limits in effect, ignore them and do the command anyway.
–max-count=num

Delete the oldest backups, keeping the number provided (default: 5).
–max-dproc=num

Refuse to execute if the maximum number of defunct processes on the system exceeds this number (default: 100).
–max-load=num

Refuse to execute if the load average exceeds this number (default: 200).
–max-size=num

Refuse to back up a site if its uncompressed size on disk exceeds this number of bytes (default: 5368709120).
–max-run=num

Do not allow more than this number of concurrent system-wide executions of the script (default: 50).
–min-freemem=num

Refuse to execute if free memory has dropped below this number of bytes (default: 1048576).
–wp-cli=path

If your wp-cli program has a different name than wp or is not in your $PATH, you can specify the command to be used to call wp-cli.
–username=name

If you run wp-tools as a root user, it will drop permissions to the specified user and chdir to their home directory.

COMMANDS

upgrade

The upgrade command will upgrade your WordPress core, themes, and plugins to the latest version available. It takes a full backup prior to the update. After the update, wp-tools will do a quick check to try to determine that nothing broke on your site. If any failures are detected, wp-tools will automatically restore to the backup taken prior to update.
backup

The backup command will create a full backup, including database, of your WordPress installation as long as it is under the --max-size limit (pre-compression).
restore

The restore command will restore a WordPress installation from a backup taken using the backup command.

EXAMPLES

# upgrade a site
wp-tools upgrade --path=public_html/myblog \
                 --backupdir=myblog_backups

# upgrade only plugins and themes
wp-tools upgrade --path=public_html/myblog  \
                 --backupdir=myblog_backups \
                 --components=plugin,theme

# backup a site
wp-tools backup --path=public_html/mysite \
                --backupdir=backups/mysite

# restore a site to a previous state
wp-tools restore --backupfile=backups/mysite/wp_backup1428524082.tar.gz

BUGS

Currently, wp-tools tries very hard to run with your $HOME as the current working directory. It will chdir there before executing its command, and it does NOT translate relative paths. This means that if you run wp-tools from outside of your home directory with a relative path, your paths won’t be found. This is a temporary limitation that will be fixed soon.

AUTHORS

Seth Johnson <sj@bluehost.com>
Charles McGarvey <cmcgarvey@bluehost.com>
Garth Mortensen <gmortensen@bluehost.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This is free software, licensed under:

The GNU General Public License, Version 2, June 1991