Wordpress & Plug-ins

How and when to update Wordpress and friends.

Unlike with some of our more atomic deployments, we usually have and need quite a bit of direct access to the production environment with Wordpress. This means we do log-in to the server and run the odd CLI command as part of maintenance. Below are some examples to help with getting a sense of where our versions and packages are.

Logging in

You can usually log into the remote host with SSL (we don't use hosts that don't allow it) and browse to the relevant domain's html or public folder:

[local] $ ssh [user]@[host]
Password: [password]
[remote] $ cd domains/[domain]/html

Checking the Wordpress version

Any decent host will have wp-cli installed, letting you get and set various things from the command line:

[remote] $ wp core check-update
+---------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| version | update_type | package_url                                                 |
+---------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| 5.5.3   | major       | https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/wordpress-5.5.3.zip |
+---------+-------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+

Checking plug-in versions

Similarly:

[remote] $ wp plugin list
+----------------------------------+----------+-----------+---------+
| name                             | status   | update    | version |
+----------------------------------+----------+-----------+---------+
| advanced-custom-fields-pro       | active   | available | 5.7.13  |
| akismet                          | inactive | available | 4.1.1   |
| archived-post-status             | active   | none      | 0.3.7   |
| astar-user-submitted-post-export | active   | none      | 1.0     |
| careerfinder-data-export         | active   | none      | 1.0     |
| duplicate-page                   | active   | available | 4.0     |
| hello                            | inactive | available | 1.7     |
| subjectfinder-data-export        | active   | none      | 1.0     |
| wordpress-importer               | active   | available | 0.6.4   |
| wp-super-cache                   | inactive | available | 1.6.4   |
| wordpress-seo                    | active   | none      | 10.0.1  |
| advanced-cache.php               | dropin   | none      |         |
+----------------------------------+----------+-----------+---------+