Gary Sieling

WordPress: Exporting Settings for a plugin

Since every WordPress plugin runs custom PHP code, it can write to the filesystem, your database, and potentially remote storage (e.g. if you use a DropBox backup plugin). In this example I’m going to show how to export settings for iThemes security, since this has a moderately complex installation.

To see what this look like, you can log into your database and list out the tables:

mysql -u root -p
select garysielingcom;
show tables;
+---------------------------+
| Tables_in_garysielingcom  |
+---------------------------+
| wp_appsin_settings        |
| wp_commentmeta            |
| wp_comments               |
| wp_cpd_counter            |
| wp_easy_todo              |
| wp_itsec_lockouts         |
| wp_itsec_log              |
| wp_itsec_temp             |
| wp_layerslider            |
| wp_links                  |
| wp_nf_objectmeta          |
| wp_nf_objects             |
| wp_nf_relationships       |
| wp_ninja_forms_fav_fields |
| wp_ninja_forms_fields     |
| wp_options                |
| wp_popularpostsdata       |
| wp_popularpostssummary    |
| wp_postmeta               |
| wp_posts                  |
| wp_term_relationships     |
| wp_term_taxonomy          |
| wp_termmeta               |
| wp_terms                  |
| wp_usermeta               |
| wp_users                  |
| wp_wsal_metadata          |
| wp_wsal_occurrences       |
+---------------------------+

Some of these are obviously WordPress tables (wp_posts, wp_users, etc), but several are for plugins I’ve installed (e.g. WP Security has several – wp_itsec_lockouts, wp_itsec_log, and wp_itsec_temp). The “wp_” part of the table name is configured at install time – if you have multiple WordPress installs in a database they would have different prefixes. This indicates that WordPress plugins with this prefix are using a WordPress API to set the table up.

Consequently, if you want to see where these are created, you need to search your site for the table name without the prefix:

grep -irl itsec_temp *    
wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/core/class-itsec-setup.php
wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/core/class-itsec-lockout.php
wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/core/modules/backup/settings.php
wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/core/class-itsec-lib.php

To export one of these tables, you can use “mysqldump”, like so:

mysqldump -p garysielingcom wp_itsec_lockouts > wp_itsec_lockouts.sql

When you inspect these, you’ll see that iThemes Security has a “create_database_tables” function that creates the above tables. However, it also shows that WordPress has settings that are tied to the site1, rather than the plugin.

These are stored in “wp_options”:

mysql> select * from wp_options limit 10;
+-----------+--------------------+----------------------------------+----------+
| option_id | option_name        | option_value                     | autoload |
+-----------+--------------------+----------------------------------+----------+
|         3 | siteurl            | https://www.garysieling.com/blog | yes      |
|         4 | blogname           | Gary Sieling                     | yes      |
|         5 | blogdescription    | Philadelphia Software Developer  | yes      |
|         6 | users_can_register | 0                                | yes      |
|         7 | admin_email        | gary@garysieling.com             | yes      |
|         8 | start_of_week      | 1                                | yes      |
|         9 | use_balanceTags    | 0                                | yes      |
|        10 | use_smilies        | 1                                | yes      |
|        11 | require_name_email | 1                                | yes      |
|        12 | comments_notify    | 1                                | yes      |
+-----------+--------------------+----------------------------------+----------+

The iThemes security values are a bit long, but you can see there are 17 of them:

 select count(*) from wp_options where option_name like 'itsec%';
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|       17 |
+----------+

You can then use the mysqldump command above, but just exporting the relevant values from iThemes Security:

mysqldump -p garysielingcom wp_options --where="option_name like 'itsec%'" > wp_options.sql

To re-import these settings, you just need to run statements to delete the values you’re importing, then re-run the SQL scripts you’ve created. Deleting the values that match what you export allows you to simply re-import (i.e. there would be no issues merging values the plugin install code may have created if you’re migrating to another site).

  1. https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_site_option []
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