Using WP-CLI, how do I delete a post by title or slug, not ID?

Question

The docs show how to delete by ID. How do I delete by slug/title?

Answer 1

There is no wp-cli command to delete a post by title, but you could easily roll your own.

Adding something like this in you current themes function.php file would work:

if (defined('WP_CLI') && WP_CLI) {
  class CYCLONECODE_WP_CLI_COMMANDS extends WP_CLI_Command
  {
      /**
       * Delete post by title.
       *
       * ## OPTIONS
       *
       * <title>
       * : The title of the post you would like to delete.
       *
       * [--type=<type>]
       * : The post type.
       * [--force-delete]
       * : Deletes the post without moving it to trash.
       *
       * ## EXAMPLES
       *
       *     wp post deleteByTitle "Hello world"
       *
       * @when after_wp_load
       */
      function deleteByTitle($args, $assoc_args)
      {
          global $wpdb;
          list($title) = $args;
          $type = $assoc_args['type'] ?? 'post';
          $force_delete = $assoc_args['force-delete'] ?? false;
          $result = $wpdb->get_results(
                  $wpdb->prepare("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts
                                  WHERE post_type = %s &&
                                        post_status = 'publish' &&
                                        post_title = %s",
                  $type, $title)
          );
          if ($result) {
              wp_delete_post($result[0]->ID, $force_delete);
          }
      }
    }

    WP_CLI::add_command('post', 'CYCLONECODE_WP_CLI_COMMANDS');
}

You should then be able to use the command like this:

wp post deleteByTitle "Hello world"
wp post deleteByTitle "foo" --type="custom_post_type"
wp post deleteByTitle "bar" --force-delete

You could also first make a query using wp-cli and then use the returned ID to then execute a post delete command:

wp post delete $(wp db query \
  'SELECT ID \
   FROM wp_posts \
   WHERE post_title = "POST_TITLE" && post_status="publish" && post_type="post"' \
   --skip-column-names \
)

In the above you will need to replace POST_TITLE with the title of the post you would like to delete.