Many thanks to the 206 (!!!) people who took our second user survey. We appreciate your time in helping us to understand how WP-CLI is being adopted by the community.

Curious as to how the numbers have changed? Take a look at the summary of the first user survey from April 2014.

By the numbers

85% of respondents use WP-CLI regularly

Of this 85%, 48% use WP-CLI multiple times per day. 37% use it a couple or few times per week. Only 15% of respondents use WP-CLI infrequently or rarely.

94% of respondents use WP-CLI interactively at the command line, 66% have incorporated it into bash scripts, and 23% are using WP-CLI with Puppet, Chef, or another provisioning system. Other tools mentioned include: Capistrano, Codeception, EasyEngine, Fabric, Grunt, and SaltStack.

Most users keep WP-CLI up to date

Over 70% of respondents keep WP-CLI up to date. Here’s how the numbers break down:

  • 13% run the latest alpha. You can too with wp cli update --nightly.
  • 58% use the latest stable release (v0.20.x at time of survey).
  • 24% are using one or two versions below the latest stable. Only 5% use a very old version of WP-CLI.

Good news — if you’re writing custom commands, you can reasonably assume it’s safe to use the latest features in WP-CLI.

WP-CLI is used for an increasing variety of tasks

Like last year, the survey included “What do you use WP-CLI for?” as a free-form field. To produce a statistical summary, I tagged each response with keywords. Of 170 interpreted values:

  • 38% (65) use WP-CLI for updating WordPress core, themes, or plugins.
  • 22% (38) transform their database in some way using wp search-replace.
  • 17% (29) rely upon WP-CLI when performing migrations.
  • 15% (26) make use of WP-CLI’s database management features: wp db export, wp db import and wp db optimize.
  • 11% (18) depend upon WP-CLI in provisioning scripts.
  • 10% (17) scaffold new themes and plugins with wp scaffold.
  • 9% (16) write custom commands for their own needs.
  • 6% (10) generate mock posts, users and comments.
  • 3% (5) are hearty souls who use wp shell, wp eval, and wp eval-file for debugging and quick scripts.

In no particular order, here are some third-party commands and workflows mentioned: Jetpack CLI, WP Parser, ElasticPress, WP Migrate DB Pro, WP CFM, BackWPUp, wp-cli-ssh, wp-instant-setup, project-template-wordpress, and provisioning a new WordPress.org Theme Review environment.

One person said they use WP-CLI to make coffee. On behalf of everyone, I look forward to the day I can install this command from the package directory.

Feature requests

Feel like contributing to WP-CLI over the holidays? Here’s a grab bag of enhancements you could work on:

  • Better documentation (internals, extending, common workflows).
  • One single uber-command to install WordPress, including downloading files, creating the MySQL database, setting up wp-config.php, and populating database tables.
  • Suggest correct syntax when a command is incorrectly entered (e.g. git staus).
  • Improved support for managing multiple networks: wp network list, wp network create.
  • Install plugins favorited by a given WordPress.org user.
  • Verify theme and plugin checksums.
  • Report when extra files are present in wp-admin or wp-includes (e.g. checksums of directories)
  • Save a template of a WordPress setup (similar to grunt {my-task}).
  • Disable all plugins except for a specific one. Or, load WP-CLI with only a given plugin active.
  • Install WordPress nightly builds without needing the beta plugin.
  • Provide a command to execute WP-Cron without requiring a HTTP request.
  • Define custom scaffolds for themes and plugins.
  • Generate posts, pages from a sitemap CSV.
  • Magically migrate data between environments (production -> staging).
  • Add option to exclude specific tables in wp search-replace.
  • Provide a way to log in with a one-time link.

If you can’t find an existing GitHub issue, please create one and we can begin discussing implementation.

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to complete our user survey! May WP-CLI continue to be a shining light for your WordPress development needs.