nixCraft Poll

Topics

Upgrade wordpress quickly in 3 easy steps from UNIX shell prompt

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: January 5, 2007]

Wordpress Logo

Since I use wordpress as CMS for 2-3 different websites, upgrading wordpress is an essential task for me. Upgrading wordpress from shell prompt is the easiest thing.

Please note that if you are not comfortable with UNIX shell prompt (IF YOU ARE new to UNIX/Linux), please follow traditional way of upgrading wordpress and DO NOT use following instructions ;)

Step # 1: Backup existing database and wordpress directory

Type the following commands at shell prompt:

$ mkdir /backup/wp/28nov2006
$ mysqldump -u user -p WP-DATABASENAME > /backup/wp/28nov2006/blog.db.sql
$ tar -zcvf /backup/wp/28nov2006.tar.gz /var/www/html/blog

Step # 2: Download latest wordpress CMS

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
$ unzip latest.zip

Step # 3: Overwrite all new files

$ cd /var/www/html/blog
$ cp -avr /tmp/wordpress/* .
$ rm -rf /tmp/wordpress /tmp/latest.zip

Open a browser and run update script such as http://yourblog.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

And you are done. Thanks to UNIX shell access. It just took less than 1 minute!!! Replace path names and database name with actual values.

In case, if something goes wrong, you can always restore old database and files from /backup/wp/28nov2006 directory.

PS: I wrote this because some one recently asked me how to upgrade wordpess from command line.

Want to stay up to date with the latest Linux tips, news and announcements? Subscribe to our free e-mail newsletter or RSS feed to get all updates. You can Email this page to a friend.

You may also be interested in other helpful articles:

Discussion on This Article:

  1. Igor Says:

    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!

  2. MichaelB Says:

    Thanks, this worked perfectly and saved me a huge amount of time.

  3. Chris Says:

    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.

  4. Life focus pro Says:

    Yes, it sounds very fast and easy. I just wish I had access to the schell.

  5. fak3r Says:

    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
  6. vivek Says:

    fak3r,

    Nice script :D. Few things
    a) change wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip to
    wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip -O latest.zip

    b) add little protection before cd ${BLOG_DIR}

    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
       cd ${BLOG_DIR}
    cp -avr /tmp/wordpress/* .
    rm -rf /tmp/wordpress /tmp/latest.zip
    else
      echo “Error failed to unzip or download failed”
    fi
  7. Video Game Sigs Says:

    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.

Leave a Reply

We encourage your comments, and suggestions. But please stay on topic, be polite, and avoid spam. Thank you very much for stopping by our site!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word

Copyright © 2004-2008 nixCraft. All rights reserved - TOS/Disclaimer - Privacy policy - Sitemap - Powered by Open source software.