Comments on: Upgrade wordpress quickly in 3 easy steps from UNIX shell prompt

By: n2j3

n2j3 — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:41:44 +0000

lifesaver. thanks :)

By: blancpain

blancpain — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 14:30:28 +0000

In it something is. Earlier I thought differently, many thanks for the help in this question.

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:38:56 +0000

@Simon J Mudd,

Generally web servers don’t care about file permission as long as they have read permission for a directory. However, before running this go to your blog directory and run the following to see permissions. Note down them:
ls -l
Once new file copied just run chown in a blog dir:
chown -R user:group .

By: Simon J Mudd

Simon J Mudd — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:29:41 +0000

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.

By: Wazzup

Wazzup — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:28:06 +0000

Is there a way to perdform the actual upgrade from the command line as well…

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

By: Video Game Sigs

Video Game Sigs — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:50:57 +0000

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.

By: vivek

vivek — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:33:59 +0000

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

By: fak3r

fak3r — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:14:59 +0000

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

By: Life focus pro

Life focus pro — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:48:46 +0000

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

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:13:18 +0000

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.

By: MichaelB

MichaelB — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 03:42:51 +0000

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

By: Igor

Igor — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:15:33 +0000

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!