Created this article to document the upgrading of Wordpress on my server.

[edit] Backing up old files

Just incase, we should backup the whole Wordpress instance folder by doing something like the following:

cp -Rp html html.backup

[edit] Download latest version

Using wget we could download the latest version.

I tend to download to my ~/downloads.

cd ~/download
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Now, we un-tar it:

tar -xzf latest.tar.gz

There should be a directory called ~/downloads/wordpress. You could view the readme.html file for information on the downloaded version.

[edit] Modifying files

Now we could modify permissions and ownership to match our configuration. For example, I change group of all apache served files.

chgrp -R www wordpress

[edit] Upgrading instances

Finally, we upgrade the files on all our Wordpress installations. This is my example:

rsync -gorRv wordpress/./ /var/www/sites/iambelmin/html
rsync -gorRv wordpress/./ /var/www/sites/bfworks/html

(We use the ./ in the origin because we need to set the base for the relative copying. See man rsync for more information)

Explanation of the options:

• -g - Preserve the group attribute of files.
• -o - Preserve the ownership of files.
• -r - Copy files recursively.
• -R - Copy files relatively.
• -v - Tell us what's going on.

[edit] Double checking

Double check files like:

• Site's icon (favicon.ico)
• Custom content (in wp-content like themes and uploads)
• Apache config file (.htaccess, .htaccess, etc)
• Other non-Wordpress files you are hosting

Also, visit the administration section (usually http://sitename/wp-admin) and the actual blog site.