Warning: geeky content!

When WordPress 2.6.5 was released yesterday, that ‘Oh no, not again!’ sinking feeling was quite overwhelming this time. You see, I have 20-something WordPress installations already — imagine the time and effort it would take to upgrade all of them. Even if there was the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, that would still mean having to access each WP dashboard and perform the semi-automatic upgrade (not fully automatic because you still have to manually click on stuff to begin and continue the process).

WPAU takes about 5 minutes to complete, a bit longer if you actually do download the backup files it generates for you. So, 20 x 5 = 100 minutes, or almost two hours! That is, if you don’t multitask and perform simultaneous upgrading — but I don’t like having sooo many browser tabs open.

So, I tried my hand on some hard-core Linux command line stuff. And it worked! I was able to upgrade all my sites to the latest WordPress version in under 2 minutes, not counting the time to learn the commands. To spare you the trouble of having to figure out the Linux commands on SSH yourself, here’s what I did.

Make sure you have backups of your WordPress files and databases!

Let’s say your hosting setup is a VPS that allows you SSH or telnet access. And let’s assume that your website directory structure is /home/username/htdocs, where username is the unique identifier of each website account, and htdocs is where the public website files reside. For this how-to, let’s say you have three WP blogs with the following usernames: myblog1, myblog2, and myblog3.

• Download the latest WordPress zip file, and unzip it.

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
cd wordpress/

That should create a wordpress directory. Let’s say you downloaded the zip file in /home — so now you have /home/wordpress, and you’re there.

• The following commands will automate the upgrading process. Note: all of the commands will be executed only upon hitting enter after the last line.

for acct in myblog1 myblog2 myblog3
do
mv /home/$acct/htdocs/wp-config.php /home/$acc/htdocs/config.bak
rm -f /home/$acct/htdocs/*.php
cp *.php /home/$acct/htdocs
mv /home/$acct/htdocs/config.bak /home/$acct/htdocs/wp-config.php
chown $acct:$acct /home/$acct/htdocs/*.php
mv /home/$acct/htdocs/wp-admin /home/$acct/htdocs/wpadmin.bak
cp -r wp-admin /home/$acct/htdocs/
chown -R $acct:$acct /home/$acct/htdocs/wp-admin
mv /home/$acct/htdocs/wp-includes /home/$acct/htdocs/wpinc.bak
cp -r wp-includes /home/$acct/htdocs/
chown -R $acct:$acct /home/$acct/htdocs/wp-includes
done

I know, I know. The process is pretty involved, but it’s well worth learning. What the above executions are supposed to do are the following: copies over the new WP files and directories to each website account (you can add as many accounts to the list after for acct in), while preserving the attributes of the original files. Each website account will also have backups of the wp-admin and wp-includes folders.

Notice that we didn’t touch the wp-contents folders of your blogs at all. That’s because there really is no need to do so when upgrading WordPress.

You might actually have a different directory structure in your hosting setup, like /var/www/domain_name/htdocs or /home/account_name/public_html. Simply replace the appropriate parts of the above code with your own directory structure. Note that, during execution of the commands, the variable $acct is replaced with each of the website accounts that you include in the list in the first line of the code (myblog1, etc.).

Caution: In case you have WordPress installations that have modifications in the wp-admin or wp-includes folders, do not include those sites in the accounts list. The above commands actually replace these two folders with fresh ones — although, your old files would still be in the backup folders.

[UPDATE] I’ve trimmed the script a bit, but the new set will work just as well. Also, please note that your server might have a different setup when it comes to account usernames. If so, the chown commands above will not work for you. You might have to do a separate set of commands for setting file/folder ownership.

With all of my WP sites safely upgraded to the latest version, now I can spend more time in the meatier aspects of blogging.

Btw, this has been my 200th post.

Posts at Random

• 21 June 2008 -- New media developments in Mindanao
• 15 December 2007 -- Davao bloggers food trip
• 9 June 2008 -- WordCamp developments
• 22 March 2008 -- Testing WordPress 2.5 RC-1
• 7 August 2007 -- Google dictionary
• 21 November 2007 -- Personal blog #5
• 10 August 2007 -- The Filipina is worth fighting for