How To Use Date Query With WP CLI?

If you’re reading this post, I’m sure you don’t need an introduction on WP CLI.

Inclined to use some stats in my monthly review post, I wanted to find out the total number of spam comments my blog received for the month of April.

Thinking that WP CLI would make my task easier, I started looking at the documentation to find out the appropriate syntax to be used with the wp comment list command.

To my surprise I found out that date query isn’t possible with WP CLI. I realized that I could leverage RESTful WP CLI and apply the date query.

RESTful WP CLI query looks like the following.

wp rest comment list

Using the help command, I figured out the options to be passed.

wp help rest comment list

In order to get the list of spam comments for the month of April, I arrived at the following command.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-03-31T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam'

Problems

However, there were a couple of problems.

• Authorization: In order to use the status option, authorization is must. Otherwise only the default value approve will be taken in to account.
• Readability: The output contains all the comment table fields cluttering the entire console.
• Getting the total count: A tabular display of data doesn’t output the total number of records.

Authorization

I solved the authorization problem using the user option in the command like shown below.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-04-27T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam' --user='admin'

Readability

I solved the readability problem using the field option in the command like shown below.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-04-27T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam' --user='admin' --field='id'

Total Count

You can obtain the count by using the --format=headers option.

wp rest comment list --after='2022-04-27T23:59:59' --before='2022-05-01T00:00:00' --status='spam' --user='admin' --field='id' --format='headers'

References

• http://wp-api.org/guides/getting-started.html#before-we-start