Brecht Ryckaert

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Tag: bash

Announcing WP Sweeper

WP Sweeper - Cleaning Script for Hacked WordPress Sites

“A new way to clean hacked WordPress sites”

I’ve spent the past couple of years learning and writing shell scripts. I’m also passionate about WordPress. As I’m often asked to clean hacked WordPress sites, I started to work on a script that automates this in a world where Corona still was just a beer.

Today I’m ready to announce WP Sweeper.

WP Sweeper shell script for cleaning hacked WordPress sites
WP Sweeper in action
Discover WP Sweeper

It’s a shell script that automates a lot of the tasks needed to clean a hacked WordPress sites. I’ve used this to clean more than a thousand sites. And now I’m unleashing my project onto the world, making it available for everyone.

Functionality

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A small bash backup script for WordPress

As most of you know I work as an Escalation Engineer at Combell.com. Recently I crafted a tiny backup script that makes backups of my own site. While this script is optimized for use on shared servers at Combell.com, it can easily be adapted to be used anywhere.

#!/bin/bash

#### Settings ####
NOW=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H%M")
FULL_PATH=$(pwd)
BACKUP_FOLDER=$FULL_PATH/data/

#### Site-specific Info ####
SITE_PATH="www" #Could also be subsites/subsitename
DB_NAME=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_NAME | cut -d \' -f 4`
DB_USER=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_USER | cut -d \' -f 4`
DB_PASS=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_PASSWORD | cut -d \' -f 4`
DB_HOST=`cat $SITE_PATH/wp-config.php | grep DB_HOST | cut -d \' -f 4`

#### Files backup ####

function files_backup {
    zip -r $SITE_PATH.$NOW.zip $SITE_PATH
    mv $SITE_PATH.$NOW.zip $BACKUP_FOLDER
}

#### Database Backup ####
function database_backup {
    mysqldump -h $DB_HOST -u$DB_USER -p$DB_PASS $DB_NAME > $DB_NAME.$NOW.sql
    mv $DB_NAME.$NOW.sql data/$DB_NAME.$NOW.sql
}

#### Runner Class ####
files_backup
database_backup

This script can be run automatically on a Combell-server by adding a cron for this script. You can do this in /etc/crontab by adding for example this: 

0 */6 * * * /bin/sh /data/sites/web/youraccountname/backup.sh

The cron above will create a backup every six hours. Do not forget to put this backup.sh script in the root of your account.

Hope this helps you guys.

PS: the FULL_PATH variable is already included since I’m planning to iterate on this script and add more features, even though it’s currently only used to declare the backup directory path.

An intro to the command-line for WordPress – Part 1

Working with WordPress on a daily basis at Combell.com (a Team.Blue company) means I get to see, optimize and debug a ton of WordPress sites each single day. This also means I sometimes need things to be dealt with quickly. And that’s where the command-line comes in…

So why won’t you use WP-CLI?

Of course I use WP-CLI too. It’s a great addition to the toolkit of any user/developer/hoster. But there are (quite often) times when WP-CLI is just not an option or too slow. And that’s no complaint or insult towards WP-CLI by the way. Let me explain by some examples:

  • When WordPress core, a certain plugin or a theme causes a fatal error, WP-CLI is rendered useless.
  • I’ve seen cases where a very poorly optimized query caused such a slowdown on WordPress that any wp-cli command, for example a wp user list, took more than 5 minutes to complete. This was solely caused by a plugin, not by WP-CLI, but it did impact WP-CLI.
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