As of late, I’ve found myself doing quite a few things via the command line with WP-CLI. If you’ve never used it before, it’s an extremely powerful command line interface for interacting with your WordPress installation. It comes bundled with some great utilities to help you out, including a WPCLI progress bar, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Where it becomes extremely powerful is with tasks that can cause a web based interface to timeout or reach the max execution times. I have found it very helpful when running migration, import, and export scripts. If you’ve ever executed a long running task in the command line, you’ve felt the pain of thinking:
Is it still going? Did it break? What’s happening?
Enter…the progress bar
WP-CLI has an awesome built in method that allows you to output a progress bar, complete with the percentages, running time, and estimated time to completion.
The code to make this happen is surprisingly simple. It consists of 3 lines:
First you define what the text will be in front of the progress bar, and the total number of items to complete.
$progress = \WP_CLI\Utils\make_progress_bar( 'Progress Bar', $total );
Next, during each step of your loop, you tick the progress bar.
$progress->tick();
After your loop is complete, you finish the progress bar
$progress->finish();
Example Plugin
