Getting WP CLI Working With MAMP

WP CLI is a fantastic command line tool for working with WordPress. You can setup new installs, install plugins, update settings all from your terminal window. However for MAMP users it won’t work out of the box, so this is how you fix it:

Error Establishing A Database Connection

MAMP comes packaged with it’s own versions of MySQL & PHP which we need to give WP CLI access to. Your default path to PHP is likely to be /usr/bin/php, or /usr/local/bin/php which is not those used by MAMP. You can find out what PHP you’re using by running the command which php in your terminal window.

The exact path to MAMPs PHP install varies depending on the version, but it will be something similar to /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.5.14/bin. You can replace the version number with your MAMPs PHP version.

You’ll need to update the WP_CLI_PHP environment variable by add the following code to your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc file (whichever you prefer). In terminal, type:

nano ~/.bash_profile

Within this file, add the path to MAMPs PHP. In my example, it would be like this:

export PATH="/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.5.14/bin:$PATH"

Press CTRL + O then CTRL + X to save and exit. You’ll then need to either source .bash_profile or re-open terminal.

Can’t Connect To Local MySQL Server Through Socket

You must have MAMP running for WP CLI to connect to the MySQL server. If you have MAMP running and you’re still receiving the “Can’t Connect” error, then you can add MAMP’s MySQL to your system $PATH. This is almost the same process as above, so re-open the ~/.bash_profile file in terminal and type:

nano ~/.bash_profile

Within this file, add the following:

export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin

Press CTRL + O then CTRL + X to save and exit. You’ll then need to either source .bash_profile or re-open terminal like before.

Vagrant

These are the 2 main errors when working with MAMP & WP CLI, but depending on your version of MAMP and version of OSX, it’s possible you will encounter other errors. For this reason (and many more), it’s worth investing the time to setup your development environments using VVV (a Vagrant configuration focused on WordPress development). Installing VVV is out of scope for this article, but you can find everything you need to get it up and running on their Github repo.