Using wp-cli to edit a WordPress options array

So you probably know that you can change WordPress options directly in the database with an SQL query, and maybe you've come across the /wp-admin/options.php page where you can edit them directly from WordPress. But if the options are held as serialized data, then it gets a bit more tricky. Luckily wp-cli can help.

I'll assume you can figure out how to download and install wp-cli yourselves. On this occasion I was trying to get rid of the annoying pop-up screen of Really Simple SSL plugin. It should disappear, never to return, when you click the x in the corner of the message, but in my case it was coming back every time I loaded every single page. Which was irritating, to say the least, and it takes up a fair chunk of space at the top of the screen. So I decided to nail it for once and for all. I found out on Google that the key was altering the rlrsssl_options => ssl_success_message_shown option.

So if you use wp-cli to get the option value it looks like this:

wp-cli option get rlrsssl_options
array (
  'site_has_ssl' => true,
  'hsts' => false,
  'htaccess_warning_shown' => false,
  'review_notice_shown' => false,
  'ssl_success_message_shown' => false,
  'autoreplace_insecure_links' => true,
  'plugin_db_version' => '3.3.5',
  'debug' => false,
  'do_not_edit_htaccess' => false,
  'htaccess_redirect' => true,
  'ssl_enabled' => true,
  'javascript_redirect' => false,
  'wp_redirect' => true,
  'switch_mixed_content_fixer_hook' => false,
  'dismiss_all_notices' => false,
  'dismiss_review_notice' => false,
)

There is also the option to display that as json, which is what we need, so lets do that, and pipe it out to a text file.

wp-cli option get rlrsssl_options --format=json > ssl.txt

cat ssl.txt 
{"site_has_ssl":true,"hsts":false,"htaccess_warning_shown":false,"review_notice_shown":false,"ssl_success_message_shown":false,"autoreplace_insecure_links":true,"plugin_db_version":"3.3.5","debug":false,"do_not_edit_htaccess":false,"htaccess_redirect":true,"ssl_enabled":true,"javascript_redirect":false,"wp_redirect":true,"switch_mixed_content_fixer_hook":false,"dismiss_all_notices":false,"dismiss_review_notice":false}

So now we edit the ssl.txt file and change this bit from false to true.

"ssl_success_message_shown":true

Then we can just send that json file back into the database with the following:

wp-cli option update rlrsssl_options --format=json < ssl.txt