WordPress 2.2.2 was released this morning (upgrade, really, do), and for the first time since I moved to my new server (about which I will post more soon), I had the fun of updating all my WordPress blogs. Normally, updating WordPress wasn’t any fun, as it meant copying all sorts of files all over the place, and doing that not once or twice, but for every WordPress I have running for me and my clients (14 at the moment…).
This time was different though… When I moved all the sites to my new server, I installed all the WordPress files from Subversion each time. You can read how to do that here, but basically it’s one line, this one is for WordPress 2.2.1:
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.1 .
Now that’s pretty easy, and because you did this from Subversion, you can now switch to WordPress 2.2.2 with just this ONE line:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.2
Of course this is only possible for those of us who have command line access to our servers, but it is very easy compared to the normal upgrade process… Now you can also switch your normal install to a subversion install very easily, in fact, this upgrade might be the perfect time to do it! There’s a full explanation of what to do here. Good luck!
Update: don’t forget to switch off ALL plugins and switch them on again one by one, saves you loads of trouble!
That is EXCELLENT info. I know I’ve seen it before, but this post comes at the EXACT moment I was swearing in my head that I now had to go through and upgrade all my blogs again.
The reason I was swearing was because I had a PEBKAC moment last month and deleted one of my blogs during an upgrade and had to restore it file by file (I skipped the backup step as well, bloody hell)!
This is a very good tip Joost! Just starting with WordPress and already was very impressed by the user-kindness of it. So this is an extra bonus to it :)
Hi Joost. A little question: when you do the “svn up” or “svn sw”, do you not get the following message for all your plugin and theme directories:
svn: Directory ‘wp-content/themes/sometheme/.svn’ containing working copy admin area is missing
@James: well, no :) You only have to do svn sw in the root, not anywhere else… It’s worked flawlessly for me :)
Thanks. I figured out what I was doing wrong. Instead of just copying the directories from the old wp-content to the new wp-content, I had removed the new wp-content first. Which removed all .svn directories which I have a feeling was the cause of the error.
Oh well. we live and learn. Thanks for your response…
i wrote a wp upgrade script in bash (so it’s a shell script, really) which makes an attempt at an automatic svn-upgrade. it makes a backup of the wp-db and -fs, turns off plugins, syncs with the latest tagged version using “svn sw� and calls upgrade.php in lynx (text-based browser).
you can fetch a tar.gz-version of it on http://futtta.be/download/WPuppy.tar.gz.
more info (in dutch, but there’s an auto translate link in the upper right corner) on: http://blog.futtta.be/2007/09/26/wordpress-automagisch-upgraden-nu-ook-met-hondje/
dreamhost comes with this one click installer. which also means, 1 click upgrade;
1 slight problem tho, you have to backup your theme/uploads, etc, and copy them back after you’ve upgraded. painful work if you run multiple WP installations.
might consider losing the 1 click installers and do everything manually if it saves me the trouble of having to backup everything before i start upgrading.
@martijn: I’m not sure I would call it “manual”.
Instead of 1-click install/upgrade, it’s 1-copy/paste upgrade with no other steps required (re: the moving of files).
The only other step you might need is a backup command, and I use tar for that…
Upgrading WordPress from subversion makes my life a lot easier. I’d love it if I could upgrade all of my plugins that way as well. I happen to use a couple of your WP plugins (google-analytics and sociable) and I was wondering whether they were available via subversion? I looked around your site a bit, but I couldn’t find your repository, if you have one.
@Jason: all WordPress.org hosted plugins can be checked out from there :)
Boy, I practically had to build a plugin just to find the URLs, but find it, I did:
http://svn.wp-plugins.org/sociable/tags/2.5.2
http://svn.wp-plugins.org/google-analytics-for-wordpress/tags/2.4.1
Oh, and thanks. :)
Hello! This is great. I’ve got several blogs that I’d upgrade this way. The one thing I am not clear on is, does upgrading this way leave the wp-content folder alone? When I look at what’s in a , it *looks* like SVN will replace wp-content?