Disabling a WordPress Plugin via Command Line

Ever look on in horror as your WordPress site crashes with no obvious reason? I have, and this time I’m writing down what I did 🙂

First I checked the logs using Docker (if you’re not running via Docker… you should be)

docker logs [container]

Hopefully that gives you some clues. In my case there were errors all over the place pointing at a particular plugin, so 1st I had to access the bash shell for that container like so…

sudo docker exec -it [container] /bin/bash

From there, simply cd to the plugin directory and rename the directory…

cd wp-content/plugins/
mv [plugin] [plugin]-off

Which should allow things to start running again. At a minimum the plugin should be disabled, and if not working you can continue the hunt.

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