WP CLI Doesn’t List Uncategorized Posts

  • I have usually had a great time deleting stuff with WP-CLI but today I noticed that despite having a few thousand uncategorized posts on a site that the following command fails to list anything:

    wp post list –cat=1 –format=ids

    If I change the category to any other it lists all the posts just not if the category is 1

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Are these posts really assigned the “uncategorized” category term? Or are they truly uncategorized by not having any assigned category term? Your command should work for the former but not the latter.

    I’m unsure of the wp-cli command parameter is for no category term at all, but the NOT EXISTS operator can be used in the actual WP_Query object. The WP_Query that wp-cli ends up using could be modified to use such an operator if there is no equivalent wp-cli command parameter.

    If you have trouble with a command that should work but doesn’t, it might help to see what the actual SQL query was. The query can be error logged from the “posts_request” filter hook.

    Thread Starter wpbroken2much

    (@wpbroken2much)

    They are assigned to category ID = 1 which began as uncategorized but was later renamed.

    It seems I can list posts by category ID for every category ID except for 1

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    As wp-cli is in a sense just the messenger, the fault likely lies within one of the site’s plugins or its chosen theme. Try deactivating all plugins and switching to a default twenty* theme to see if that makes a difference. If the problem persists, it could be informative to know what the actual SQL ended up being.

    Thread Starter wpbroken2much

    (@wpbroken2much)

    Thanks for the feedback. I just noticed another problem in which I have a couple thousand posts in the trash but when I run the CLI command to empty the trash it says there are no items in the trash at all.

    I have to run empty trash in the admin area to empty the trash.

    I tried using skip plugins and skip themes same problem.

    It was emptying the trash fine until at some point last night I kept seeing notices of failing to delete posts in the terminal. Can’t think of any reason why WordPress would refuse to delete a trashed item.

    Also, I will not break an entire site by switching the theme just to delete a few things. The current theme is Newspack. There are too many plugin performing essential tasks to start deactivating any of them

    Finally, why would WordPress run any plugin code at all in response to a deletion?

    This worked instantly but doesn’t change the fact that the normal CLI delete function does not work.

    wp db query ‘DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type=”post” AND post_status=”trash”;’ –skip-column-names

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Of course it’d be silly to switch themes or deactivate plugins just so you could do some operation. The reason for the suggestion was to ensure the issue was within wp-cli itself and not due to some other influence. For testing only, not as a reasonable work-around.

    When WP initializes, it loads all active theme and plugin code, whether it’s needed or not. If a plugin has hooked into the query process to somehow customize it, it could apply this too broadly and inadvertently affect other processes that it shouldn’t be affecting.

    That query is correct for emptying trash. You are able to empty trash from WP admin, right? But not via wp-cli? So the correct query is failing to work from wp-cli only. It apparently never executes, otherwise it would have worked. It seems wp-cli is at least trying to execute it, otherwise you’d not see any failure messages.

    My best guess is there’s some kind of breakdown in authentication so WP thinks you’re not authorized to delete. Doesn’t explain why category 1 doesn’t return results since no authentication is normally required for that.

    I think you’re going to need someone better versed in the inner workings of wp-cli to help you resolve this. Because I’ve cluttered up this topic with a bunch of replies, it is much less likely to get the attention of anyone else. We normally discourage the re-posting of topics, but it’d be the best way to get the attention of someone more knowledgeable of wp-cli. Go ahead and do so with my blessing. Include everything you’ve done to investigate to avoid re-trodding over the same ground again. I recommend using a different title so it doesn’t look like a duplicate topic.

    I’ll leave a note in your account saying I recommended re-posting in case anyone should question it.

    Hi @wpbroken2much,

    Seems there were other category parameters to try, like --category_name, or --category_in, to do some troubleshooting.

    Though, in the end you likely needed to run wp post list with --skip-plugins and --skip-themes to be sure no plugins, or themes, were creating a conflict.

    Hope this helps somebody else…

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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