Updating WordPress via Subversion

I read a few months back that Stuart Langridge was using Subversion to keep his WordPress up-to-date and I thought: “that’s clever” and didn’t do anything about it.

Today I was talking to Matt and he mentioned updating one of his WordPress installations and I noticed I was due an update myself. I downloaded the latest release and was having a quick skim through the upgrade procedure to make sure I wasn’t forgetting about anything and I spotted a link to the Subversion update instructions… I’m off work sick today and have the time so I decided to give it a go.

I backed up my database and checked out the latest stable version:

steve@decaf~$ cd /var/www/sickbiscuit.com steve@decaf:/var/www/sickbiscuit.com$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3/

I copied over my database config file, theme, plugins and uploads and ran the wp-admin/upgrade.php script via my browser. The final act was to modify the symlink pointing to the WordPress directory and it worked first time. Profit!

Hopefully whenever I need to update in the future all I’ll have to do is use the following:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/NEW_VERSION/

followed by running the database upgrade script again. Quick and painless.