I actually have a couple little scripts I use to update my site instead of using the WordPress built in tools. Invariably, when someone has problems with the automated upgrade tool I comment that I rarely use it. That means people ask me ‘Well how do you update WordPress?’ and I tell them ‘Manually.’ Which isn’t really true. Sometimes I say ‘I wrote a script.’ So … here’s my scripts for upgrading WordPress. I don’t have one for themes, since I always do that manually and check everything. That’s the bane of having highly customized child themes.
These are both Bash shell scripts and run perfectly happily on my server (Linux running CentOS). They’re GPL2, free, and somewhat use at your own peril.
As I went to post these, I took a bit of time cleaning them up, putting in comments (the ‘Blame Nacin’ bit is a joke) and formatting them nicely. When I started to look at the plugin one, I realized how freakin’ crazy it is and how many weird custom things I tucked in there. Also I made it so you always had to put in a version number, which if I wanted to ‘release’ that, is something to do away with. One of the catches with it is that a plugin’s ‘default’ zip file of plugin-name.zip is the trunk build. So you’d always have to know your version to upgrade.
On the WordPress upgrader, I could trick that with a simple “if the version is ‘latest’, then download latest.zip”, because the WordPress most recent release is latest.zip. Now, I never call that. I like being master of my domain (pun? maybe) so I always make the time to know what I’m calling. I could have assumed that if you don’t put a version in, you want to install the latest, which is pretty easy to flip around, but I don’t like to assume like that. Still, you can take the code if you want it and do that.
On the other hand, I think if someone wants a plugin, then they should be able to go ‘Get me the plugin’ and it should default to the latest. Probably this is because I test trunk WordPress a lot, but rarely do I trunk a plugin. Since there’s no easy to gank default like that for plugins, I came up with this really fun bit of code, shoved in an if-then check. I really like awk, by the way. It’s insanely powerful.
# We're getting the readme from the repo and using that to calculate the latest stable release.
wget -qO $1-readme.txt http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/$1/trunk/readme.txt
if ! [ -f $1-readme.txt ]
then
echo "FAILURE: The plugin is goobered in the WordPress repository, so we can't determine the latest stable release."
exit 1
else
tr -cd '\11\12\40-\176' < $1-readme.txt > $1-readme-tr.txt
VERSION=.`awk '/Stable/ {print $3}' $1-readme-tr.txt`
rm $1-readme.txt $1-readme-tr.txt
fi
All these are free for use, and both are under GPL2. I can offer SOME support, but they’re filed under ‘Works for me!’ in my bin.
