Cyberchicken

What the heck, it works! Thank you!
Option looks OFF whatever I try to save. This alone could be a saver.
I’ll need some explanation, but first I will connect it to my constant in the wp-config and make some tests.
I will post back asap.

Thank you for the support Christi!

I will think about suggesting this feature to the UpdraftPlus Backup developers, but I don’t think this feature really belong there.

I studied the glorious wp-copy-tool and though looks viable, I found there’s a specific interface for changing options, update_blog_public().

I wrote a more specific post
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/mu-plugins-and-options-override?replies=2#post-6724726
and raoulwegat gave us a decisive push. Looks like his code does the job. I’m going refine it a bit (and understand how it works).

Thank you!

Thank you for the reply Christi.

I learnt from this forum the “meta” effect of that option and I like it.

The robots.txt option was tanken longly into consideration but was discarded for privacy and maintanability reasons. I didn’t mention it, but I often host other tools beside wordpress, and I don’t want to publish their presence using robots.txt
Beside that, are you implying that I can put a robots.txt in each wordpress installation and have it working? Because afaik robots.txt is read by spiders only from the root of a domain/subdomain.

In the end what I really would like to do is the subject of the topic: override options in the db using php code.
After a few trials I posted a specific question about that: in the end if a plugin can set the options, I can write a plugin that does that, and I can drive the plugin with a global constant set in wp-config.

Tell me your thoughts
Thank you!