Keep Wordpress Updated Easily on Linux

thanksajdotcom

We all know that Wordpress is wonderful but also also having new vulnerabilities found in it, etc. Well, if you want to easily keep your Wordpress updated, here is what I do.

There is a way to manage Wordpress via the CLI, which can be found here: http://wp-cli.org/

First,

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

Next, check if it works:

php wp-cli.phar --info

Then, to make it executable and able to just type wp, use this:

chmod +x wp-cli.phar
sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

After that, I created a script in the /etc/cron.hourly folder, which may be overkill but that's me, and it does the following:

#!/bin/sh
cd /var/www/builtbyart.com
wp core update --allow-root
wp theme update --all --allow-root
wp plugin update --all --allow-root

cd /var/www/literaryworksbyaj.com
wp core update --allow-root
wp theme update --all --allow-root
wp plugin update --all --allow-root

cd /var/www/thanksaj.com
wp core update --allow-root
wp theme update --all --allow-root
wp plugin update --all --allow-root

So every hour, again I know it's overkill but it's a lightweight thing if nothing needs to be done, it will update the core of Wordpress, the themes, and the plugins for every site on my server. The --allow-root is kind of annoying because you have to be running the command as a root user to execute most of these but you have to allow the command to run as root. Hope that helps someone!

Thanks,
A.J.