wp-cli displays php notices when display errors off

My solution to disable notices etc is to know if the wp-config.php is call via cli or not. So put this little code in wp-config.php

$sapi_type = php_sapi_name();
if ( $sapi_type == 'cli' ) {
    define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );
} else {
    define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
}

There are likely 2 php.ini files

• /etc/php/7.0/cli/php.ini This is for your Command Line Interface (CLI)
• /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini This is for your Web Server, in this case Apache2

To update what errors are reported on the command line, update the error_reporting line in the cli/php.ini

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT

First, you have to do your PHP error settings in your php.ini file unless the PHP ini directives don't list it as PHP_INI_ALL - which is the case for nearly error related definition.

So I'm assuming you just misread something and set stuff to wp_settings.php instead of wp-config.php.

The next point is that WP CLI might run WP in different cases without some stuff loaded, so it could get bypassed.

The safest point to set some php.ini stuff always is your php.ini file. And if you can't work around errors: Go and fix them - that's what errors, warnings and notices are for. If it's a plugin causing it, send a pull request and notify the author.

Note: If you are in/on your Terminal/Command Line, you can use php --ini to list all locations where your php.ini files are stored. Some operating systems support different locations per default. And some packages like XDebug have additional locations per default.

Example php --ini result on Windows:

Configuration File (php.ini) Path: C:\Windows
Loaded Configuration File:         C:\dev\php\php.ini
Scan for additional .ini files in: (none)
Additional .ini files parsed:      (none)

Example php --ini result on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:

Configuration File (php.ini) Path: /etc/php5/cli
Loaded Configuration File:         /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
Scan for additional .ini files in: /etc/php5/cli/conf.d
Additional .ini files parsed:      /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/05-opcache.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/10-pdo.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-curl.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-gd.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-json.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-mysqli.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-pdo_mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-readline.ini,

You can use the --require= argument to include a file that sets error reporting level and whether or not to display errors. I did something similar to this in a shell script:

# Suppress errors by including this generated file
echo "<?php error_reporting(0); @ini_set('display_errors', 0);" > __pre.php

rc=0

for i in 905 1000 10001; do
    wp --quiet --no-color --user=admin --require=./__pre.php \
        post update $i --post_status=draft \
           || (rc=1 && break)
done

rm -f __pre.php
exit $rc

Note the ./ because it will not default to the local path but will use PHP's include_path. Need to bypass that in this case.

If you do not suppress the errors, any PHP notice will cause an exit status of non-zero. Not desirable in my case because I want the loop to stop as soon as any real error occurs.