Using wp-cli to Update WP Networks / Multisite from 3.5.1 to 3.8

I’ve been handed a WP Networks site that is running WP (Networks) 3.5.1 on RHEL 5.8 with about 40 sites attached to it. I see the need to update to 3.8.

By background, I’m more familiar with maintaining Drupal sites with Drush. My first hunch here is to use wp-cli to run the update.

Is this the preferred update method in the WP community or am I better swapping out php files from the tar ball? That is, can I depend on wp-cli to run a clean update from 3.5.1 to 3.8?

Many thanks!

For regular users, the preferred update method is pressing the “Update” button in wp-admin.

For sysadmins, wp core update + wp core update-db will probably be a lot faster. Note that for multisite instances, you’ll have to update the DB for each site in the network. See https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli/issues/683

NB: I might be biased, since I’m currently the maintainer of WP-CLI.