Updating Wordpress engine via SSH

Wordpress updates made me sick. My blood boiled every time when a stable update came out. I had to download package to my local HD, unpack it and upload files to server. All this while keeping in mind fact, that i had to prepare it to prevent overwriting some crucial files/directories – otherwise I’d end with broken blog. To make things worse, I’ve got several blogs running on separate WP engines. There had to be an easier way…

And there is – updating WP via SSH. Open up terminal (on Windows use PuTTY, on a Mac OS run Terminal.app)

Backing up your current WP installation at this point isn’t a bad idea.

wget wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xzf latest.tar.gz
cd wordpress/
rm -rf wp-content/
cp -R * ../path/to/blog/directory/

First line downloads the latest stable WP package in tar format.

To unpack it to the actual directory use tar xzf command (second line). If you’d now run ls command, you should see a new directory called wordpress/, right? Ok, lets move on.

We’ll now enter this new directory (third line) to removewordpress/wp-content/ directory (fourth line). By doing that, we’ll prevent overwriting previously installed themes and plugins during update process.

Last thing to do in terminal is to overwrite old files with their new equivalents (last line).

Now log in to your wp-admin page – if needed, wordpress will automatically update it’s database structure and shortly after that greet you with higher version number.

All this makes updating WP much less pain, but what when you’ve got multiple WP engines installed on the same server/account? In a few days I’ll finish and upload a polished Bash script that solves this problem updating multiple instances at once.