Written by Admin on 2025-05-06

Downloading WordPress from the Command Line

If you're a developer or someone who prefers to work from a command line interface, you'll be happy to know that you can download and install WordPress without ever leaving your terminal. In this article, we'll walk through the steps to download WordPress from the command line.

Step 1: Accessing the Command Line Interface

The first thing you'll need to do is make sure that you have access to the command line interface on your system. This will vary depending on your operating system, but most modern systems have some kind of command line terminal available.

Step 2: Downloading WordPress

Once you've accessed the command line interface, navigate to the directory where you want to download WordPress. You can do this using the cd command followed by the path to the directory.

Next, use the wget command followed by the URL of the WordPress download. For example, to download the latest version of WordPress, you would use the following command:

wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip

This will download the latest version of WordPress in a compressed ZIP file format.

Step 3: Extracting WordPress

After the file has finished downloading, use the unzip command followed by the name of the downloaded file to extract the contents of the file. For example, to extract the contents of the latest.zip file, use the following command:

unzip latest.zip

This will extract the WordPress files to a new directory called wordpress in the current directory.

Step 4: Installing WordPress

You can now move the extracted WordPress files to your web server directory or localhost (assuming that you already have Apache, MySQL, and PHP installed). If you're unsure of the directory, or it's different for Apache or Nginx you can use the command below.

mv wordpress/* /var/www/html

This command assumes that your Apache server is located in /var/www/html.

Finally, you'll need to create a new MySQL database for WordPress to use. You can do this using the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for your MySQL root password, then open up the MySQL client. From here, you can create a new database using the following commands:

CREATE DATABASE wordpress; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpressuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Be sure to replace wordpressuser and password with your own username and password.

Conclusion

In this article, we walked through the steps to download and install WordPress from the command line. While it may seem intimidating at first, using the command line can be a powerful tool for developers and users who want to work more efficiently. By following these steps, you can have WordPress up and running in no time.