Upgrade wordpress quickly in 3 easy steps from UNIX shell prompt

hey, you cloned my script i wrote recently! ;-)

little sidenote: tarballs (.tgz) are smaller than zipfiles… but that doesn’t matter these days.

have fun!

Be very careful with this method. Since it is basically overwriting existing files with new ones etc it is NOT removing depreciated files which may or may not have security holes in them.

Thanks for the script, I’ve changed it to make it more generic, can be run via command followed by the instance name of your site’s directory.

#!/bin/bash

# Modify these variables for your system
BLOG_DIR=/usr/local/www/data-dist
BACK_DIR=/root/wp

# Do not modify these variables
DATE=`date +%Y.%m.%d`
INSTANCE=${1}

# If there's no variable, explain usage and exit
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
        echo "usage: $0 "
        exit 0
fi

# Backup existing database and wordpress directory
mkdir -p ${BACK_DIR}/${INSTANCENAME}/${DATE}
mysqldump -u root -p ${INSTANCE} > ${BACK_DIR}/${INSTANCENAME}/${DATE}/${INSTANCE}.db.sql
tar -zcvf ${BACK_DIR}/${INSTANCENAME}/${DATE}/${INSTANCE}.tar.gz ${BLOG_DIR}/${INSTANCE}

# Download latest wordpress CMS
cd /tmp
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip

# Overwrite all new files and cleanup
cd ${BLOG_DIR}
cp -avr /tmp/wordpress/* .
rm -rf /tmp/wordpress /tmp/latest.zip

exit 0

Thanks to this post I was able to upgrade WP on my sites in no time. I dreaded having to wait for the slow ftp process to complete with my sites being down.

After testing the process on one site and seeing how fast it was, I did not even bother activating the maintenance mode plug in on the other sites. My users tend to get pissed off when the site goes down for a few mins and following the steps you provided prevents this.

One thing I did before copying over the new WP files to the site, was delete the wp-contents folder from the new WP files. I did not want it over writing what I had in my existing WP-contents folder (plug-ins and themes)

Thanks again.

Handy to know but misses an important point: users and permissions on the server. This can make or break things quite significantly on a box. I’ve found the instructions on what the correct ownership of the wordpress files to be either missing or not clear to me.

So should ALL wordpress files be owned by the apache user, or perhaps owned by another user with the group set to the group the apache server runs as? That’s what is not clear to me and could be better documented.