Access WordPress API Outside of WordPress (command-line PHP)

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I have a PHP script that I need to run as a cron job. However this script needs access to the WP API (get_pages(), get_post_meta() and get_permalink() specifically). I’ve followed the instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Integrating_WordPress_with_Your_Website, but to no avail.

Code:

require_once('../../../wp-blog-header.php');
$args = array(
    'child_of' => 2083
);
$pages = get_pages($args);

However when I run php -q this_file.php from the command-line I get the following output:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Database Error</title>

</head>
<body>
    <h1>Error establishing a database connection</h1>
</body>
</html>

Anyone have any thoughts/suggestions?

4

WordPress expects the $_SERVER variables to be setup as if it were a normal web request. Also, I would suggest loading wp-load.php instead of wp-blog-header.php since you probably don’t need the WP class or the template loader to run. Here is how I normally start any scripts I need to interact with WP from command line:

define('DOING_AJAX', true);
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
$_SERVER = array(
    "HTTP_HOST" => "mysite.com",
    "SERVER_NAME" => "mysite.com",
    "REQUEST_URI" => "https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/",
    "REQUEST_METHOD" => "GET"
);
require_once('current/wp-load.php');

Update 2018:

Nowadays WordPress doesn’t require $_SERVER at all. If you simply need to access WordPress API functions (e.g. to read/write to the database), all you need is:

require_once('current/wp-load.php');

# your code goes here...

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