Track WP-CLI version in Site Health

[wpscholar]

Currently, there is no data about WP-CLI in Site Health. Assuming that WP-CLI is present, we should display the version number in the Site Health info tab.

If WP-CLI is available, track the version in the Site Health info tab.

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53252

[pbiron]

I like the thought, but wouldn't it be cleaner if WP_CLI, itself, hooked into ​debug_information and added the information?

That is, I think this ticket should be closed and an issue opened at ​https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli.

[wpscholar]

Replying to pbiron:

I like the thought, but wouldn't it be cleaner if WP_CLI, itself, hooked into ​debug_information and added the information?

That is, I think this ticket should be closed and an issue opened at ​https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli.

Well, first thing to note is that the debug_information hook is only run when the Site Health info tab is loaded. If WP-CLI hooked in, it wouldn't have any impact since those are two separate runtimes.

While I suppose that it is possible for WP-CLI to store the data, the assumption there is that WP-CLI would actually have to be used in order to get the version of WP-CLI stored in the WordPress database. It is also possible that a site's host doesn't allow shell_exec which would prevent the method I've used here. Maybe the better option is to do both? If shell_exec is enabled and WP-CLI is present, log the version. Or, if WP-CLI has been used and stored a version in the WP database, then we could pull that value instead.

A few downsides of doing it on the WP-CLI side though are that some commands don't load up WordPress and, when they do, we may not want to attempt a database write on every command.

[Clorith]

I'm curious what information this provides to the end user. The presumption being that they can't use WP-CLI without accessing the commandline in the first place, and at that point they could very easily grab the version themselves.

I'm being a bit restrictive in jumping on this possibility because of the conditionals that need to be met in the hosting environment for this to even be possible to add. (I am aware that the GhostScript check also uses exec to grab the version, but this isn't something we'd want a pattern of adding if it can be avoided)