Wordpress automatic updates

By devin, 1 March, 2018

I maintain a couple of wordpress sites, and I rarely want to spend time keeping them up to date. I use this permissions script https://www.devinhoward.ca/technology/2014/mar/wordpress-permissions-sc… though, which disallows Wordpress's normal auto-update mechanism. This vastly increases the security, which is worth it, but I need another way to auto-update.

So I use this script, along with the excellent command line tool wp-cli: https://wp-cli.org

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

WP_ROOT="$1" # e.g. /home/devinhoward/wordpress
WEBSITE="$2" # e.g. https://wordpress.devinhoward.ca
WP_CMD=/usr/local/bin/wp

cd $WP_ROOT
$WP_CMD core check-update | grep -v 'WordPress is at the latest version'
$WP_CMD plugin status | grep '^ U'
$WP_CMD theme status | grep '^ U'

CHANGED=''

CORE_OUTPUT=$($WP_CMD core check-update | grep -v 'WordPress is at the latest version')
if [[ -n "$CORE_OUTPUT" ]]; then
  CORE_UP_OUTPUT=$($WP_CMD core update | grep -v 'Success: WordPress is up to date.')
  echo $CORE_UP_OUTPUT
  git add -A .
  git commit -m "$(echo "$CORE_UP_OUTPUT" | head -n1)"
  CHANGED=changed
fi

PLUGIN_OUTPUT=$($WP_CMD plugin status | grep '^ U')
if [[ -n "$PLUGIN_OUTPUT" ]]; then
  $WP_CMD plugin update --all | grep -v 'Success: Updated 0/0 plugins.'
  git add -A .
  git commit -m " $PLUGIN_OUTPUT"
  CHANGED=changed
fi

#
# Theme updates are too scary, otherwise you could add a section here.
#

# create a textual verification that the website actually still renders
if [[ -n "$CHANGED" ]]; then
  COMMAND="pandoc -f html -t markdown $WEBSITE"
  echo "$COMMAND yields: "
  $COMMAND
fi

Some notes:

I keep my wordpress websites under version control via git. You can remove the four lines that use git if you don't do this.
The last section uses pandoc to verify the site still renders. I have never experienced my site not rendering, but when cron sends me an email it's a nice reassurance. If you don't have pandoc, you can remove this section as well as the "CHANGED" variable.
Finally, here's the crontab line I use to run this every day at 1am:

00 01 * * * /usr/local/bin/check-wp-updates.sh /home/devinhoward/wordpress https://wordpress.devinhoward.ca | mail -E -s "Automatic Wordpress Updates" myemail@mydomain.ca

Wordpress automatic updates

Wordpress automatic updates

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