Thu 25 April 2013 | tags: security, updates, wordpress, wp-cli, -- (permalink)

Wow. Somehow I missed when this amazing tool was released. wp-cli. Just wow.

I have a bunch of scripts I use to keep all the Wordpress installs up to date on my server, it finds all the installs, then it downloads the latest version, checks each install for the installed version and updates them by extracting the files correctly, ensuring user permissions etc. However, that only keeps the core updated, I still need to rely on all my customers to keep their plugins updated. This is ok, except when a plugin has a security issue and needs to be updated ASAP. Recently, we had just that situation with the WP-Super-Cache plugin. So I modified my scripts, and now they update that particular plugin. But it would be a pain to write a script that updated every plugin, so I'm stuck logging into a number of sites I maintain, updating all the plugins regularly, and then hoping for the sites that the customer maintains, they do the same.

Enter, wp-cli. The tool I've been dreaming of for a long time. Simply install, then using the basic structure of my script (the part that finds all installs, verifies they are valid installs, and executes commands as the user who owns the install), I can now run any of the awesome wp-cli commands on all the sites I host! Server maintenance just got a whole lot easier (as long as no plugin updates break things)

For the really lazy, here is my code for updating all plugins, using the wp-cli scripts. It uses sudo, so make sure you know what you are doing. You may also have to tweak how locate finds things, as by default it won't show you files you can't access.

#!/bin/bash

# Just find all installs and try and run tools in them
# find wp-config.php files
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
installs=$(locate -r wp-config.php$)

for conffile in $installs
do
# goto root wp dir as user
    wpdir=$(dirname "$conffile");
    pushd $wpdir > /dev/null || exit

    echo "Checking $wpdir..."

    ## Check we actually have a wordpress install

    if [[ ! -f "wp-includes/version.php" || ! -f $conffile ]]
        then echo "$wpdir doesn't appear to be a wordpress install, skipping..."
        continue
    fi

    # Get username for tool
    username=$(stat -c %U $conffile)

    # run tool commands
    sudo -u $username -- wp plugin update-all

    popd > /dev/null
done