how to update serialized options programatically?

Question

I want to automate updating plugin options. There are some things that I repeat a lot.

With wp-cli I know I can update simple options like this:

php wp-cli.phar option update blog_public 1

However, some plugin options save their options in a serialized string.

Example of serialized option_value in wp_options:

a:9:{s:4:"from";s:21:"[email protected]";s:8:"fromname";s:51:"xxx";s:4:"host";s:13:"smtp.xx.com";s:10:"smtpsecure";s:3:"ssl";s:4:"port";s:3:"465";s:8:"smtpauth";s:3:"yes";s:8:"username";s:21:"[email protected]";s:8:"password";s:13:"xxx";s:10:"deactivate";s:0:"";}

How to update those options?

Answer 1

WP-CLI is definitely the answer to this after the update to 1.4.0 which introduced the pluck and patch commands for accessing serialized data in WordPress.

The pluck command takes this format for grabbing serialized values

wp option pluck <key> <key-name>

For example in the active_plugins option you can grab first item

wp option pluck active_plugins 0

The patch command takes this format for inserting, updating or removing serialized values (the action)

wp option patch <action> <key> <key-name> <value>

Deleting the first active_plugin would look like this

wp option patch delete active_plugins 0

The same pluck and patch were also added for other commands like postmeta, you can now use WP-CLI to do some cool loops for updating WordPress serialized data programmatically

Answer 2

Solved it myself, this is how to do it:

If you want to programatically update serialized options:

download wp-cli from wp-cli.org

Find out what is the "key" for the options you are using. In this example the key is "wp_smtp_options"

If you don't know the key, search in wp_options table and try to figure it out.

Example: select * from wp_options where option_name like '%smtp%'

Now that you know your key, use this command to save your configuration to json file:

php wp-cli.phar option get wp_smtp_options --format=json > my_saved_config.txt

Whenever you want that configuration to be restored use this command

php wp-cli.phar option update wp_smtp_options --format=json < my_saved_config.txt

Notes:

• works in WAMPSERVER64
• works with unicode characters like ñ á é
• you can have your json file with paddings and spaces, for legibility

It would be great not having to use an intermediate file for this purpose. Does anybody know how to do it?

Answer 3

Here is how I do it in a bash script:

wp option get wp_smtp_options --format=json | php -r '
$var = json_decode( fgets(STDIN) );
$var->from = "[email protected]";
$var->fromname = "me";
print json_encode($var);
' | wp option set wp_smtp_options --format=json

Answer 4

The WP-CLI command option does use WordPress' Options API to do its job. Given, e.g. with the subcommand update, a correct input, an array, you should be able to do this with WP-CLI. You should make use of the --format parameter here, to make sure you get the same, json works generally fine for the update subcommand. Note, the subcommand get should return you the option unserialized, because the Options API is used, which you then can save, modify and/or transfer/set-up on other/new installations.