Requirements

MigrateWP drives tools you probably already have. Here is the short list to check before your first run.

System requirements

MachineRequirement
LocalmacOS, running your WordPress site under Local
RemoteLinux, with the WordPress site served from a path you can reach over SSH

Dependencies

On your Mac

  • WP-CLI 2.4.0 or later, aliased to wp
  • rsync 2.6.9 or later

On the remote server

  • An SSH user with permissions over the WordPress installation folder
  • WP-CLI 2.4.0 or later
  • rsync 2.6.9 or later

Checking what you have

$ wp --info
$ rsync --version
$ ssh username@8.8.8.8 'wp --info; rsync --version'

MigrateWP checks for WP-CLI itself at the start of every run. If it cannot find it, it stops and prints the install steps rather than failing halfway through a migration.

Installing WP-CLI

If wp is missing, the canonical instructions are at wp-cli.org. The short version:

$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
$ php wp-cli.phar --info
$ chmod +x wp-cli.phar
$ sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp
$ wp --info

MySQL on the local machine

MigrateWP works out which MySQL socket your Local site is using and puts the MySQL binaries on the path if they are not there already, so in most cases there is nothing for you to do. If wp db commands fail outside MigrateWP too, that is the thing to fix first.