Auto Plugin & Core Updates Not Working For Custom Theme

Question

I have a custom WordPress theme I've developed and have included the following lines in my wp-config.php in hopes to automate plugin and core updates:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true );
add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_true' );
add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_true' );

I've let it process for about a week now but the plugins that have available updates aren't updating. Do I need to include anything additional in my theme's functions.php to initiate these automatic updates?

Additionally, does anyone know how quickly these updates take place when a new plugin or core update is released? Or is it essentially instantaneous?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

There's a page here about Configuring Automatic Background Updates.

It says specifically not to put the filters in wp-config.php, so you should definitely move those to functions.php; they were probably not registered if added in wp-config.php so that explains why you didn't get plugin or theme updates, but core updates should have worked. Only constants like define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true ); should go in wp-config.php.

It's not extremely clear from docs in the codex when or how these auto updates get run, but this article says they're triggered from WP-Cron at 7a.m. and 7pm local time. So you should definitely expect an update to happen within 12-24 hours at the most. Note this is dependent on having enough traffic to your site to trigger WP-Cron.

Docs say that core updates trigger a notification email however plugin and theme updates do not.

Does that help?

Answer 2

Just confirming that I did indeed solve the issue! The problem was the following line within wp-config.php that was put in place by Installatron:

define('AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true);

Once I updated this to "false", and added the following lines to functions.php, the automatic updates worked perfect:

add_filter( 'auto_update_core', '__return_true' );
add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_true' );
add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_true' );

Hope this helps others with similar problems!