OK, this one is obscure. I only post about what I can’t find on Google!
Until recently it has been possible to run command-line PHP scripts that include wp-config.php or wpmu-settings.php, in order to give those scripts access to WordPress globals like $wpdb, functions such as wp_insert_post etc.
These scripts worked with WordPress-MU until recently — now the scripts just exit with no output.
The reason? WPMU now initiates a redirect in the bootstrap process (search for ‘header( “Location: “‘ in wpmu-settings.php). A browser can follow that redirection, but a command line script cannot. So, if you want to initiate scripts that run from the command line, you will have to get the web server involved by invoking a text browser such as curl, wget, or links.
It’s best not to force your scripts to figure out where to find wp-config.php anyway. I have taken to using a method suggested in this thread, as shown in the code sample below. The good news is, you know that your script will work the same whether initiated from a plugin in a graphic browser, used in an Ajax call, or initiated from cron or the command line shell.
So instead of kicking your script off with something like
/usr/bin/php -q myscript.php
You will create the script as a proper plugin and do something like
/usr/bin/curl -d mypp_cmd=status http://mywpmusite.com
Sample plugin code used for the above example follows. The prefix for the functions is ‘mypp’, which of course stands for ‘MY Plugin Prefix’ to create a unique namespace. The code below returns results as JSON encoded, and calls die()/exit() at the end to prevent an entire page being created. For log files run from cron, you may choose to return plain text instead.
/** * Add a query var for this plugin * This allows Ajax programs to operate without requiring file paths * Instead, Ajax functions look for the query var 'mypp_cmd' */ function mypp_query_vars($qvars) { $qvars[] = 'mypp_cmd'; return $qvars; } // function mypp_query_vars /** * Handle AJAX requests in the template_redirect action * We recognize our requests from the query var 'mypp_cmd' * Here we allow GET requests using $_REQUEST; to restrict to POST, use $_POST instead */ function mypp_template_redirect() { global $wpdb; $cmd = get_query_var('mypp_cmd'); $response = array(); if ($cmd) { switch($cmd) { case 'status': $response['status'] = array('success' => true, 'message' => 'Sample status message'); break; default: $response['status'] = array('success' => false, 'msg' => 'Unknown command', 'cmd' => $cmd); break; } // switch $cmd header('Content-type: text/x-json; charset=utf-8'); print utf8_encode(json_encode($response)); die(); } // $cmd is set } // function mypp_template_redirect add_filter('query_vars', array($this, 'mypp_query_vars')); add_action('template_redirect', array($this, 'mypp_template_redirect'));
