How to set default language for WordPress install

WordOps uses WP-CLI to install and perform other tasks on WordPress blogs.

The default language for new blogs is en_US but it can be easily adapted to any other locale.

WP-CLI expects a configuration file to be placed on ~/.wp-cli/config.yml. We won't cover all its possibilities right now, only the configuration required to customize the localisation.

For example, in order to have WordPress in Brazilian Portuguese the config.yml file would be:

core download:
  locale: pt_BR

Caveats

There is a "caveat" one should be aware of: when a new version os WordPress is released it usually does not have translations for all possible locales. Setting up a configuration file like the suggestion above might lead to WP-CLI (thus WordOps) to behave inconsistently.

How to change locale of a blog already installed

In order to avoid such inconsistence, perhaps it's wiser to install WP in en_US as usual, then later change its locale. The root user would do:

cd /var/www/example.com/htdocs
wp language core install pt_BR --activate --allow-root
cd wp-content
chown www-data:www-data languages -R
# the languages folder is created with owner / group root by the wp language call, this allows update of translations from the dashboard updates page