Wp wc product delete

wp wc product delete: Delete WooCommerce products.

$ wp help wc product delete

NAME

  wp wc product delete

DESCRIPTION

  Delete an existing item.

SYNOPSIS

  wp wc product delete <id> [--id=<id>] [--force=<force>] [--porcelain]

OPTIONS

  <id>
    The ID for the resource.

  [--id=<id>]
    Unique identifier for the resource.

  [--force=<force>]
    Whether to bypass trash and force deletion.

  [--porcelain]
    Output just the id when the operation is successful.

Delete products in bulk - Simple

Deleting regular posts can be done with wp post delete. An example of removing regular posts in bulk: wp post delete $(wp post list --post_type='page' --format=ids).

When the same approach is taken for deleting products in bulk, you might get something like this:

wp product delete --user=4 $(wp product list --user=4 --format=ids)

Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Probably because the output of $(wp product list --user=4 --format=ids) isn't clean enough to be processed by the outside part. This is not unique: It happens with a bunch of WP-CLI commands.

This can easily be solved, by using xargs -n1 to clean up the output of wp wc product list before handing it over to wp wc product delete:

wp wc product list --user=4 --format=ids | xargs -n1 wp wc product delete --user=4

Last notes:

• In the commands above, every time there are max. 100 IDs processed. A loop might me needed to delete all, but let's skip that for now
• Execution time on my laptop: About 2s per product → About 9h for 17,000 products. Let's see how we can speed this up...

Delete products in bulk - With Parallel

Also when using Parallel, we still have to clean up the output of the list command before we can process it. E.g., this doesn't work (syntaxis from ChatGPT!):

wp wc product list --user=4 --format=ids | parallel -j8 --delay 0.2 wp wc product delete --user=4 {}   # ERROR

but this does:

wp wc product list --user=4 --format=ids | xargs -n1 |parallel -j8 --delay 0.2 wp wc product delete --user=4 {}

This was tested on my laptop (8 processing units). Processing time went from 2s/product to 0.55s/product - About 4 times as fast.

Let's see how it works with the double amount of threads:

wp wc product list --user=4 --format=ids | xargs -n1 |parallel -j16 --delay 0.2 wp wc product delete --user=4 {}

Processing time went from 0.55s/product to 0.532/product.

And now without specifying the number of threads:

wp wc product list --user=4 --format=ids | xargs -n1 |parallel --delay 0.2 wp wc product delete --user=4 {}

Execution time: 0,50/product

And without delay:

wp wc product list --user=4 --format=ids | xargs -n1 |parallel wp wc product delete --user=4 {}

This gave some errors like

Error checking in buffer: The buffer you checked in was not checked out

and execution time was the same → Let's keep the delay.

Delete products in bulk - With Parallel & outer loop

As mentioned before, you can list max. 100 product IDs at a time. And since we use Parallel already 'inside' the script, let's have a regular loop around this:

j=$(wp wc product list --user=4 --format=count)
j=$((j/100 +1))

for ((i=0; i<j; i++))
do
   echo $i"/"$j
   wp wc product list --user=4 --format=ids | xargs -n1 |parallel --delay 0.2 wp wc product delete --user=4 {}
done

Delete products in bulk - With Parallel & inner loop?

Somehow, I find it attractive to see if the 'outer loop' can be parallelised and that the inner loop becomes just a loop: I suspect this approach would have less rescheduling overhead. It wouldn't be rocket science: The inner loop just needs an offset for each command.

See also

• Concatenation (Bash)