Month: February 2016

How to use UpdraftPlus when The Bad Thing™ happens

I am in the process of handing over a site to someone who's not used WordPress before and doesn't necessarily know where what lives and how. I thought it would be a good idea for me to document how to use the free UpdraftPlus plugin.

I use the commercial version of this plugin because it is fire-and-forget for my multisite installation. But if you are running a standalone installation of WordPress then the free version is a good suitable option.

Continue reading “How to use UpdraftPlus when The Bad Thing™ happens”

Did I mention I like WP-CLI?

I’ve written praise for wp-cli before but it’s a toy that will never get old for me.

I was working on this problem for a friend and I needed to create a test multisite installation. I have a domain I can use aside from my main one so I setup another nginx virtual host, setup the DNS entries and used Let’s Encrypt to obtain legitimate X.509 certificates.

For creating the DB and WordPress config I used CLI commands.

$ mysql -u root -p

create database leeloodallas;
grant all privileges on leeloodallas.* to 
"brucewillis"@"loc1alhost" identified by "5oM3U36ul$tringH3re";
flush privileges;
exit;

$ wp core download

$ wp core config --dbname=leeloodallas \
--dbuser=brucewillis \
--dbpass=5oM3U36ul$tringH3re \
--extra-php <<PHP
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );
PHP

$ wp core install --admin_user=yourlogin \
--admin_password=Y3a2n0tHaP3n1ng \
--admin_email=you@example.com \
--url=blog.dn7.me \
--title="Leeloo Dallas Multisite"

$ wp core multisite-convert --subdomains

Yes, all the passwords and IDs are changed.

When I get into deep water (and I did) I just rm * -rf in the virtual host’s directory and in mysql drop database leeloodallas; and do it all over again.

The only thing different from other times is the wp core multisite-convert --subdomains command. I already have cookie cutter nginx configs and DNS is fire and forget. Once I had the vhost setup the Let’s Encrypt commands (also scriptable) was trivial.

WP-CLI is cool and scripting this is such a time saver.