There are lots of automatic Wordpress upgrade plugins, but do to some server restrictions I couldn’t get them to work correctly. So I made a simple bash file to upgrade this Wordpress site for me. The script only backs up the current web site directory, and does not do any DB backups. I used this script to upgrade from 2.7.1 to 2.8 and just today from 2.8 to 2.8.1 and the blog is still up, so I guess it works OK!

Variable definitions:

• WORDPRESS_DOWNLOAD_URL – the URL of the latest Wordpress version to download
• WORDPRESS_LATEST – the file name of the downloaded Wordpress version
• WORDPRESS_EXTRACT – the directory the Wordpress files are extracted when the download file is uncompressed
• WORDPRESS_DIR – the web root directory where the Wordpress files will be copied to, and where your wp-config and wp-content files will be copied to (your blogs web root)

To use, create a new file, say wordpress_upgrade.txt, copy and paste the code below, and make wordpress_upgrade.txt executable (chmod 755 wordpress_upgrade.txt). Run via ./wordpress_upgrade.txt and when its done, sign into your blog to run any DB upgrades. I run this script from my home directory, and “public_html” is where my Wordpress files reside. This script can be run from any location, as long as the paths are setup correctly and accessible.

Note: this script does not perform a database backup!

#!/bin/bash
# Upgrading Wordpress steps
# From home directory

WORDPRESS_DOWNLOAD_URL="http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz"
WORDPRESS_LATEST="latest.tar.gz"
WORDPRESS_EXTRACT="wordpress"
WORDPRESS_DIR="public_html"

echo "Removing current latest.tar.gz"
rm latest.tar.gz

echo "Backing up current Wordpress"
tar -cf wordpress-backup.tar $WORDPRESS_DIR
#get wp-config.php and wp-content/ out of wordrpess directory
echo "Grabbing wp-config.php and wp-content/ and putting them in ~/mywordpressfi
les."
cp $WORDPRESS_DIR/wp-config.php mywordpressfiles
cp -r $WORDPRESS_DIR/wp-content/ mywordpressfiles
echo "Downloading latest Wordpress form $WORDPRESS_DOWNLOAD_URL"
wget $WORDPRESS_DOWNLOAD_URL
echo "Extracting $WORDPRESS_LATEST..."
tar -zxf $WORDPRESS_LATEST
echo "Copying $WORDPRESS_EXTRACT to $WORDPRESS_DIR."
cp -r $WORDPRESS_EXTRACT/* $WORDPRESS_DIR
echo "Copying wp-config.php and wp-content/ files back to $WORDPRESS_DIR."
cp mywordpressfiles/wp-config.php $WORDPRESS_DIR
cp -r $WORDPRESS_EXTRACT/wp-content/* $WORDPRESS_DIR/wp-content
echo "Should be done, now go to Wordpress Admin to upgrade!"