Auto-Upgrade to 4.2.2 fails because theme functions.php is included instead of wp-includes/functions.php

Question

I'm trying to upgrade WordPress to the latest 4.2.2. On the screen, I'm seeing:

Downloading update from https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/wordpress-4.2.2-no-content.zip…
Unpacking the update…
Could not create directory.
Installation Failed

And in the php error log, I get

 PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function add_action() in /home/userhome/public_html/wp-content/themes/launchframe/functions.php on line 81, referer: http://example.com/wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-core-upgrade

What appears to be happening is the theme functions.php file is being included instead of the wp-includes/functions.php. This is new though - previous upgrades have gone fine. I've tried including the "missing" files in my theme's functions.php (i.e.)

require_once('/home/userhome/public_html/wp-includes/plugin.php');
require_once('/home/userhome/public_html/wp-includes/theme.php');
require_once('/home/userhome/public_html/wp-includes/shortcodes.php');
require_once('/home/userhome/public_html/wp-includes/media.php');

But ultimately that failed because more and more files ended up being referenced. I also tried calling wp-load.php from my theme's functions.php file, but that ended up loading my theme again and got "function already defined" errors.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Answer 1

I am not confident your guess at "being included instead" is accurate. The inclusion of core file is hardcoded in wp-settings.php pretty hard, it would be extremely challenging to subvert under normal circumstances.

I have trouble imaging scenario in which functions.php of the theme will be loaded, but add_action() will be unavailable. This simply shouldn't ever happen under normal mechanics.

My best guess is that your installation is strangely customized or otherwise corrupt.

I would start looking into specifics of strange theme's functions.php load, probably by dumping wp_debug_backtrace() from there for starters.