This post is a quick, temporary break from my usual privacy/civil rights posts, to a post of a slightly more technical nature.
As WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the internet, updates become crucial. However, the way WordPress runs at certain clients of mine means it’s not always just a question of clicking a button (or it happening automatically, as in recent versions of WordPress).
For security reasons, at certain websites in need of high security, but whose editors still want the ease of use of something familiar like WordPress, I like to keep WordPress off the publicly-accessible internet, and then have a static HTML copy of the website publicly accessible. This has advantages of security (the publicly-accessible web server only has to be able to serve static HTML and images), and also causes much less load on the server, allowing the server to respond to a much higher number of requests. This however, causes issues with the automatic update feature that’s built in to WordPress.
I recently wrote a script that can automatically update WordPress to the latest version available from the WordPress website, which is useful in cases where the automatic update feature in WordPress does not work, for instance when the admin interface is not routable on the public internet, such that it never gets notified if there’s a new version and can’t reach the public internet to fetch the updates.
In that case you’re forced to do the updates manually. The script I wrote was designed to help with that. I wrote it to expedite the task of updating WordPress, instead of having to manually remove certain directories and files, downloading the tarball from the official WordPress website, checking the SHA-1 checksum and then carefully copying the files/directories back over.
Demo
This is a quick demo of how it works:
The script is meant to be run whilst in the directory containing the WordPress files. Put the script somewhere in your PATH, go to the directory containing your WordPress files, then run it like so:
$ update-wordpress.sh
The script will automatically detect what version is the latest available (from the website), download that if necessary, or else use the copy of WordPress stored in the cache, and it will only update the website if the versions don’t match up.
Git
The script will also automatically detect if it’s running in a git repository. If this is the case, it will use the git rm command to properly record the removal of directories, and then do a git add . at the end.
To save even more time, the script can also auto-commit and push the changes back to a git repository if necessary. For this, the variables GIT_AUTOCOMMIT and GIT_PUSH exist. The default value is true, meaning that the script will automatically make a commit with the message:
Updated WordPress to version <version>
and then push the changes to the git repository. Of course, provided that you’ve correctly configured git to do a simple git push.
Caching
It will cache the latest version of WordPress in a directory in your home directory, called $HOME/.update_wordpress_cache, where it will put the latest.tgz file from the WordPress website, the SHA-1 checksum, and also the actual files unpacked in a wordpress directory. This is to prevent the script from re-downloading the files when you have multiple sites you want to update.
License
The script is free software, MIT licensed, and the code is on GitHub.