I have around 1200 large images which I'd like to regenerate. I'm using the WP-CLI command wp media regenerate. After around 61 images are generated, the terminal shows the message Killed.

Why is this happening and how can I fix it?

I have around 1200 large images which I'd like to regenerate. I'm using the WP-CLI command wp media regenerate. After around 61 images are generated, the terminal shows the message Killed.

Why is this happening and how can I fix it?

• wp-cli

• If the kernel killed it there will probably be an entry in /var/log/messages. – Rup Commented Apr 8, 2019 at 10:49

2 Answers 2

Which version of WP-CLI are you using? What is wp --version returning you?

Seems a little bit that you may be running out of memory as this is quite a large amount of images and there doesn't seem some proper batch processing implemented in version 1 of WP-CLI. At least, that's how I'd understand this issue WP-CLI issue Clear WP object cache periodically on media regenerate/import which I found in the WP-CLI v2.0.0 Release Notes.

Is upgrading WP-CLI an option for you? If not you could also install it as a project-local dependency using Composer. Maybe you need to init a bare bone Composer project with composer init in your WordPress folder first.

$ cd /path/to/wordpress
$ composer require wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle:^2
$ vendor/bin/wp media regenerate

Had the same problem. wp media regenerate would always get stuck at the same point with the Killed message, even with the --only-missing option.

In my case it was always after ID 571, so I tried wp media regenerate 570, which was the next one, and it also failed with the same message. So I deleted this image from the media library and now it's working.

By the way, adding --debug wouldn't give any hint about the problem. I also couldn't find any PHP logs about it.