WP-CLI Issue with VPS

If you don’t know what that means, you’re not interested in this post! 🙂

I installed wp-cli on my development server in the office, and while I’m still in the learning process, it is already quite helpful. Creating a framework for a plugin or block, for example, is great.

I wanted to use it to update multiple sites conveniently on my VPS, and I ran into a problem. The program produced no output. I found an error, “PHP Fatal error: PHP Startup: Cannot use both zlib.output_compression and output_handler together!! in Unknown on line 0.”

This might give you the idea that it was a problem with zlib compression, and in a way it was, but I was unable to fix it by removing the compression. That is, until I discovered that the problem was that from the SSH shell, it was running under PHP 5.6 rather than 7.0. I was modifying the files for 7.0 which was what I was using for that particular account. The default was 5.6, set from WHM. After I changed the default to 7.0, everything began to work.

As a note, if you want to update multiple sites that are in different accounts, you need to use the shell as each account user. Having read up on the details, I absolutely understand why the documentation strongly recommends not running as root. Also, a jailed shell won’t work, which presents a security issue from a different angle. Since there are only a couple of accounts to which this applies, and my only need on those is to verify that plugins and themes are up to date, my immediate solution is to unjail the shell momentarily, execute the check, then jail it again.

For the moment, this is working.