Activating a single plugin via php

Question

OK I know this has been asked before but I want to know the most efficient and clean way I can do this.

What I have is an auto provision through serverpilot which installs WordPress for a client on a digital ocean server.
The problem I'm having is this:
I want to activate a plugin that helps the client when he first starts out on WordPress. The problem I'm having is I can't have my script access their DB to activate the plugin once the script adds the file to the plugin directory. I want the plugin to be activated through PHP. So far this solution looks good but I want to know if this is the easiest and cleanest way of activating a plugin that I'm dropping into the plugins directory

function MY_toggle_plugins() {
    include_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/plugin.php' );
    $temp_files1 = glob(WP_PLUGIN_DIR.'/*'); 
    $activated=array();
    $already_active=array();
    foreach($temp_files1 as $file1){
        if(is_dir($file1)) { 
            $temp_files2 = glob($file1 . '/*');
            foreach($temp_files2 as $file2){
                if(is_file($file2) && stripos(file_get_contents($file2),'Plugin Name:')!==false) { 
                    $plugin_name_full=basename(dirname($file2)).'/'.basename($file2);
                    if(is_plugin_active($plugin_name_full)) {
                        array_push($already_active, $plugin_name_full); 
                        //deactivate_plugins($plugin_name_full);
                    }
                    else{
                        array_push($activated, $plugin_name_full);
                        //activate_plugin($plugin_name_full);
                    }
                }

            }
        }
    }
    echo 'You have activated these plugins:<br/><br/>'.serialize($activated).'<br/><br/>These were already active:<br/><br/>'.serialize($already_active); exit;
} 
//execute
MY_toggle_plugins(); 

Answer 1

If you already have the plugin installed as part of the initial setup, you can add a loader for it in mu-plugins that activates it.

Must-use plugins don't require activation themselves, so adding a call to activate_plugin() inside it will attempt to automatically activate your plugin on every load. That becomes a problem if you ever want to deactivate the plugin since it'll just reactivate on the next page load, but one way around that is to remove the must-use plugin to enable deactivating the other one.