That's the shortest way I know to install the WordPress shell extension WP-CLI:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar > /usr/local/bin/wp && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wp
Is there an even shorter way?
Note: I use Ubuntu 16.04.
Downloading the Phar file is the recommended installation method for most users. As you showed, it's basically just one line. It can't really get shorter than that. And the steps make sense: download the file, make it executable and move it to the right location.
There are alternative ways to install WP-CLI though. For example, if you're using Composer, and have something like ~/.composer/vendor/bin in your PATH (or C:\Users\you\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\bin on Windows), you can just run:
composer global require wp-cli/wp-cli
To update everything globally, run composer global update.
Alternatively, on Debian or Ubuntu you can just download and open one of the .deb packages: https://github.com/wp-cli/builds/tree/gh-pages/deb
On macOS you can install WP-CLI via Homebrew: brew install homebrew/php/wp-cli
sudo apt-get install composer -y Then, composer global require wp-cli/wp-cli and use WP-CLI regularly right away?
Commented
Feb 4, 2018 at 12:59
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc. You only need to run this a single time. This way, your OS will search in the vendor directory when you run wp.
Commented
Feb 4, 2018 at 13:03