Using WP-CLI with WordPress 4.6 on DreamHost

NOTE: This article is out of date and likely obsolete.

I use WP-CLI from time to time to do maintenance on my WordPress sites that I host on a DreamHost VPS. But today I tried to run the search-replace function and found that wp wouldn’t run. Instead I got this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function apply_filters() in */path/to*/wp-includes/load.php on line 317

It didn’t take long to confirm that WordPress 4.6 had changed things around, breaking the version of WP-CLI on my server. As it turns out, WP CLI 0.24 fixes this, but DreamHost is running 0.24-alpha.

So I tried installing the current version locally on my account, only to get a different error:

Fatal error: Class 'Phar' not found in */path/to*/wp-cli.phar on line 3

I found this article very helpful for enabling PHAR support on a DreamHost VPS. I went into ~/.php/5.6/phprc (create this file for your version of PHP if you don’t have it) and added:

extension=phar.so
phar.readonly = Off
phar.require_hash = Off
suhosin.executor.include.whitelist = phar

Once I verified that it would work by running /usr/local/bin/php-5.6 wp-cli.phar --info, I took the opportunity to (a) override the wp command with the local one and (b) make sure it used php 5.6 by adding the following alias to my .bash_profile:

alias wp='/usr/local/bin/php-5.6 ~/bin/wp-cli.phar'

This won’t be needed once DreamHost updates their WP-CLI package, but for now, it solves my problem faster than waiting for a response from tech support.