Private theme update with zip archive without deactivating the theme

Question

I have a private theme and I want to deploy new theme versions of it as smoothly as possible.

I've heard about:

• hosting the theme somewhere like wp-updates.com
• using plugins to update theme automatically directly from a repository (using plugins like https://github.com/afragen/github-updater or https://wordpress.org/plugins/revisr/)
• uploading zip archive with a newer version of the theme (it requires activating another theme, deleting previous theme version and uploading a new zip archive with the new theme version).

So I came up with an idea to update theme using each time a zip file with a different name (for example my-awesome-theme-0.1.zip and so on).

Is it a good idea or am I missing something?

Answer 1

I've been using this approach for private theme updates using versioned archives and it seems to work for me pretty well. No problems found yet. So I guess for private themes - it is a good one.

Also I came up with a script for building versioned theme archive like this:

#!/bin/bash

echo "======================";
echo "BUILDING THEME ARCHIVE";
echo "======================";

# Get version from style.css and CHANGES.md and compare them.
# If they are the same - proceed.

VER_STYLE="$(cat style.css | grep 'Version: ' | perl -pe "s/Version: (.*)\\n/\1/g")"
VER_CHANGES="$(head -n 1 CHANGES.md | xargs | awk '{ print $2 }')"

if [ $VER_STYLE != $VER_CHANGES ]; then
    printf "\e[31;5;21m%s\e[0m\n" "BUILD FAILED"
    echo "Your version in style.css ($VER_STYLE) differs from version in CHANGES.md ($VER_CHANGES).";
    echo "Please actualize.";
    exit 1;
fi

# Theme archive build.
# Also create a new tag for builded version.

build_name="my-theme_$VER_STYLE.zip"

echo "Building $build_name ...";

zip -r -q \
    --exclude=.* \
    --exclude=sass/* \
    --exclude=*/.DS_Store \
    --exclude=*.md \
    --exclude=*.zip \
    --exclude=*.sh \
    $build_name . && git tag $VER_STYLE && git push --tags && printf "\e[32;5;21m%s\e[0m\n" "done" ;

exit 0;

Answer 2

With direct access to server typically people just upload/sync file changes on top. However this leaves possibility that someone is visiting the site just as theme is in the process of being updated.

The way to do it with minimum interruption:

1. Upload new version to a separate directory (e.g. theme-name-update).
2. Rename old theme directory ( theme-name > theme-name-old).
3. Rename update directory (theme-name-update > theme-name).

When you do steps 2 & 3 in one CLI command (or have a script for it) that makes the swap extremely fast and unlikely to cause issues.