Why environment variables don’t suppress WP-CLI PHP Deprecated warnings — the phar + shebang path and a three-part structural fix

A previous post covered to verify that the code itself retains the intended structure — catching regressions that runtime tests alone would miss. Total test count went from 942 to 993.

Wrap-up

Environment-variable-based Deprecated suppression works when PHP is invoked directly, but doesn’t reach a shebang-launched phar like /usr/bin/wp on Xserver. The v1.6.8 fix addresses this in three layers:

• 
  Pillar A: parse wp_cli_path and inject -d directly when it’s a php-direct invocation


• 
  Pillar B: locate the JSON range in stdout rather than parsing the whole string


• 
  Pillar C: unify json.loads call sites to return (parsed, raw) tuples

When an environment variable "doesn’t work," the most productive first question is whether the path it’s supposed to reach even sees it. That structural diagnosis — rather than trying variations of the same configuration — is what led to this fix. For the original Deprecated noise and the v1.6.6 three-layer defense, the earlier post on WP-CLI PHP Deprecated noise covers the symptom side of the same problem.