Marco Chiesi

Who’s afraid of the command line? — WordCamp Rome 2018

Interfaces have spent decades getting friendlier, and yet the command line remains irreplaceable for some jobs. A practical tour of WP-CLI for people who do not consider themselves developers.

WordCamp Rome 2018 speaker card for Marco Chiesi’s command-line talk

I gave this talk at WordCamp Rome 2018 in Rome, Italy, in Italian (original title: Chi ha paura della command-line?).

Human–machine interfaces have spent decades becoming simpler and more intuitive. And yet there are jobs where the command line is still the better tool — the steady rise of WP-CLI, now officially supported by WordPress, is the evidence.

The argument of this talk was that you do not need to be a programmer or a sysadmin to get something concrete out of command-line tools. After a short introduction, I went through a series of practical, easily copied examples where the command line saves a genuinely ridiculous amount of time.

What I covered

  • Why a text interface still wins for repetitive and bulk operations
  • WP-CLI from a standing start: installing it and running something useful in a few minutes
  • Bulk content, user and option operations that are painful in the admin and trivial here
  • Updates, database search-and-replace and migrations without clicking through screens
  • Where to stop: the things you should still do in the admin

Slides and recording