wp-cli on a shared host

Here’s how I installed wp-cli on a shared host (HostRocket).

First, download the latest version:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

Test if it works:

php wp-cli.phar --info

You should see something like this:

PHP binary:binary/usr/bin/php
PHP version:version5.5.29
php.ini used:used/etc/php.ini
WP-CLI root dir:dirphar://wp-cli.phar
WP-CLI global config:config
WP-CLI project config:config
WP-CLI version:version0.21.1

If this works for you then move the file into ~/bin and you are done:

mv wp-cli.phar ~/bin/wp
chmod +x ~/bin/wp

This didn’t work for me though. I hit an issue with HostRocket’s PHP setup and saw:

???p????Q??

It turns out this is due to PHP’s detect_unicode setting. To test:

php -d detect_unicode=Off wp-cli.phar --info

This output the correct info.

To address this, I created a small wrapper wp in ~/bin/wp:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# We need to disable unicode detection for wp-cli to work
php -d detect_unicode=Off "$(dirname "$0")/wp-cli.phar" "$@"

And moved the files into place:

mv wp-cli.phar ~/bin/
chmod -x ~/bin/wp-cli.phar
mv wp ~/bin
chmod +x ~/bin/wp

Now when I run wp it disables detect_unicode and works properly.

EDIT, Apr 26, 2016: I discovered today that I embarrassingly forgot to pass arguments in the Bash script above. I’ve corrected it, the missing bit was the trailing "$@".