Going Plaidinum: WordPress Login, Coming to a Browser Near You — at Ludicrous Speed

The hype is real. Today I unveiled my latest command for WP-CLI – the login command.

Why a command to login? We don’t need to login to interact with WordPress from the command line. We _do_ need to login to do just about anything else though! I’m a huge fan of using WP-CLI, but until WP-CLI has 100% feature parity with wp-admin, we’ll all forced to keep using it for now. That was a joke.

Everyone needs to login at some point. We’re all familiar with how that normally goes:

This process gets multiplied and often over complicated as soon as you start factoring development, and staging environments. Users and passwords can differ between environments (even though they shouldn’t), and password managers complicate things more by requiring you to duplicate saved entries for each environment or configure things like Equivalent Domains to share the same login across multiple domains.

If you’re nodding your head right now, there’s another way.

Ever login on Slack before? (Everyone says “yes”) How cool is that option to use the “magic link” that they email you and you can just click that to be logged in?! Medium and others are picking this up as what will most likely be the new way users prefer to login to their apps. Why is that? Think about it – the process of using a password can be.. painful (see above again). That leads some users to compromise a secure password for something that makes their life easier. What if you could have a way to login that was more secure than your password and easier to use? This is what the magic link strategy is aiming to do.

For developers though, getting an email sent can be a non-option or just equally slow. It may not even be possible, if for example, you’re working offline (fly much?) or for some reason, the site isn’t able to send outgoing mail, or you’re not able to receive it. Don’t get me wrong, the email option is great, and the login command supports that too (in style), but it’s not the speed we’re looking for.


WP-CLI Login Command Demo

What could possibly faster than that? If you think you know, drop it in the comments below :)

Hungry for more on the login command? Read on, friend.

If you find the command useful, give it a star on GitHub or tweet a friend!

LUDICROUS SPEED; GO!

You know what to do.
Taking Your Site To The Next Level: Integration Tests with WordPress & PHPUnit
Installing the WordPress Test Suite with Composer [Part 1]