Automatic background updates

No, you’re not the only one – all my sites are the same.

I’ve installed the Background Update Tester plugin on a test site and that reports that my platform fully supports background updates, so I’m not sure why these aren’t happening.

Here’s what I got:

Background Update Tester

Automatic background updates require a number of conditions to be met.
PASS: Your WordPress install can communicate with www.ads-software.com securely.
PASS: No version control systems were detected.
PASS: Your installation of WordPress doesn’t require FTP credentials to perform updates.
PASS: All of your WordPress files are writable.

This site is able to apply these updates automatically. Cool!
If you experience any issues or need support, the volunteers in the www.ads-software.com support forums may be able to help.

None of my WP sites auto-updated either .. despite their “Cool!” status.

I experienced the same thing on 8 WP sites. All claiming to be cool when running the Background Update Tester. I updated them manually just now.

Howdy everyone,

First up, Background Updates are only installed at 7am/7pm, times designed to be when you’re hopefully not writing a post (unfortunately you’ll get locked out for a few seconds).

Next, Because we weren’t sure how Background Updates were going to affect both upgrade reliability (hint: it’s currently at 99.999% success, and that small remaining few were when it said “Nope, something might go wrong, this user will have to manually update”) and the www.ads-software.com networks (There’s 2.1million downloads of 3.7, if they all try to update to 3.7.1 at the same second, that’s going to cause problems) the Background update has been slowly rolled out to all sites. I know it has, because I’ve been changing the % for the last few hours and keeping an eye out for problems!

It’s currently being rolled out to approximately 20% of installs, over the coming few hours it’ll increase to 100%.

So if you wait until the next 7pm/7am timeslot (Based on your Timezone specified in Settings -> General) it’ll happen automatically.

This wasn’t a security release, just bugfixes, so we’re happy to take our time and make sure nothing breaks, future releases (as we get better at this whole instantly-updating-the-entire-internet thing) will probably be rolled out much faster than this was.

Also forgot to mention, when your WordPress install attempts to update, it’ll email you if it succeeds, and in the unlikely event it realises it can’t do it for you, it’ll also let you know and ask you to do it manually (by clicking the button).

Thanks for the explanation Dion, I wondered if that might be the case.

Best of luck automatically updating the Internet in future. I’m sure it’s quite exciting at this early stage.

I have a site on our dev server that was running the 3.7 beta and release candidates. A cron job is triggering wp-cron every ten minutes. During the beta and rc’s the site did the nightly test updates perfectly. It’s a smooth system. When 3.7 was released, it did the automatic update to 3.7 just fine.

But now that dev site is still on 3.7. I believe it has passed the 7pm/7am update moment twice. But we are located in the Netherlands (GMT +1), perhaps we missed the release of 3.7.1 last night by an hour or so. I’ll let you know what happens at 7 o’clock tonight and tomorrow morning.

Thanks for the explanation indeed! I was confused, it got me looking for an option to enable the automatic updates. But they are supposed to work right out of the box, I understand. ??

A couple of my sites have now auto-updated.

Okay … that makes sense. I did leave one site unchanged to see what would happen. It updated at 7:05pm server time. So looks like all good.

Thanks for the explanation.

Hm, that dev site I talked about yesterdag is still on 3.7. I should have mentioned before that the WordPress Beta Tester plugin was left active. My guess is that the WordPress Beta Tester plugin is conflicting with the automatic update process somehow. I had set it to ‘Bleeding edge nightlies’ during the beta test of 3.7 and left it like that. No automatic updates have taken place since the automatic update to 3.7 final. The last email that was sent after the successful update to 3.7 said:

Howdy! Your site at <dev site> has been updated automatically to WordPress 3.7.

For more on version 3.7, see the About WordPress screen:
<dev site>/wp-admin/about.php

WordPress 3.8.1 is also now available. Updating is easy and only takes a few moments:
<dev site>/wp-admin/update-core.php

[…]

I expected the site to update automatically to a 3.8.1 nightly build, or at least 3.7.1.

The Beta Testing WordPress settings page now shows a warning:

‘Please note: There are no development builds of the beta stream you have choosen available, so you will receive normal update notifications.’

I have disabled the WordPress Beta Tester plugin for now to see what happens at the next 7 o’clock interval.

According to the following post, non-english installs are currently not receiving background updates:

https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/2013/10/26/new-plugin-background-update-tester/#comment-11078

Well, in one of my site it just keeps saying 3.7.1 is available. Please update now.

I manually update, everything seems to be ok, then after few hours the message goes up again and I have to reinstall the update. I did it twice and it keeps moving me back to 3.7.

I have several sites that say they are eligible for automatic update, but haven’t updated. It looks like sites on one host updated, and on the other not. No error emails. Background Update Tester says All Passed.

This is an English installation.

exactly like davidroccato, after 4 days of having 3.7.1 my dash board still asks me to update: “WordPress 3.7.1 is available! Please update now.” Very annoying…

FYI, I just got back to the office and noticed that on last Friday November 1st, our 3.7 dev site updated to 3.7.1–nl_NL automatically.