Custom plugin which downloads updates from custom endpoint, extracts new version zip into a new name

Question

I've built my own plugin, hooking into a combination of

• site_transient_update_plugins
• transient_update_plugins
• plugins_api

to automatically query, along with passing the current plugin version to a specified endpoint, which in return, grabs a temporary URL zip file from an S3 bucket based on the version provided.

This basically allows me to manage a lot of plugin versions per specific WordPress environments without pushing my private code WordPress. This all works fantastic. My endpoint after being fed ?v=1.0.0 will return a URL to a .zip file from our S3 bucket with the next 2.0.0 release, like so:

https://BUCKET.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-plugin/2.0.0/plugin-name.zip?X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=...X-Amz-Signature=...

Unzipping plugin-name.zip produces a single directory of plugin-name, which contains the 100% correct version files. No problem there.

WordPress correctly tells me that my plugin has an update. I can see the custom details I provided from my endpoint such as description, screenshots, changelog, version, tested, required, banners, etc.

However, when I go to upgrade the version in WordPress, all works good, downloads and installs a new version (even refreshes the version from 1.0.0 to 2.0.0), but once I reload/navigate to/from the page, it errors with:

The plugin plugin-name/plugin-name.php has been deactivated due to an error: Plugin file does not exist.

I look in the wp-content/plugins and find my plugin has been renamed from plugin-name to plugin-name-<random-slug>. <random-slug> is always different, but it ALWAYS contains the new versions code (2.0.0 in my case).

I can re-activate the plugin, but now if I run wp plugin list from the CLI, I get plugin-name-<random-slug>, and in my code, I explicitly rely on the correct plugin-name/plugin-name.zip

This is my first real time doing anything like this in WordPress, so a little unsure how to fix. How can I hook into the upgrade, so after it's downloaded the zip, and unpacked it, I can rename the folder back to plugin-name?

Any ideas would be much appreciated!

add_filter('site_transient_update_plugins', array($this, 'register_update_check'));
add_filter('transient_update_plugins', array($this, 'register_update_check'));
add_filter('plugins_api', array($this, 'register_plugin_details_overrides'), 20, 3);

//

public function register_update_check($updates)
{
    if (! is_object($updates)){
        return $updates;
    }

    if (! isset($updates->response ) || ! is_array($updates->response)) {
        $updates->response = array();
    }

    // Query WordPress plugins available
    $this->response = $this->queryPluginVersions();

    // Compare the version
    // If returned version is greater than installed version,
    // mock & return WordPress response, feeding it a .zip
    // file which WordPress downloads, unzips the zip,
    // completely replacing the plugin and its files
    if ($this->response->version > $this->version) {

        // Only mock our plugin
        $updates->response['plugin-name/plugin-name.php'] = (object) array(
            'slug'         => 'plugin-name',
            'new_version'  => $this->response->version,
            'url'          => $this->response->url,
            'package'      => $this->response->download_url,
            'sections'     => array(
                'description'   => $this->response->sections->description,
                'installation'  => $this->response->sections->installation,
                'changelog'     => $this->response->sections->changelog,
                'screenshots'     => $this->response->sections->screenshots,
            )
        );
    }

    return $updates;
}

//

public function register_plugin_details_overrides($result, $action, $args)
{
    if ($action !== 'plugin_information') {
        return $result;
    }

    if ('plugin-name' !== $args->slug) {
        return $result;
    }

    return (object) json_decode(json_encode($this->response), true);
}

//

public function queryPluginVersions()
{
    // Build the query, appending ?v=<version>
    $url = sprintf(
        '%s?v=%s',
        $this->endpoint_url,
        $this->version
    );

    $remote = wp_remote_get($url, array(
        'timeout' => 10,
        'headers' => array(
            'Accept' => 'application/json'
        ))
    );

    return json_decode($remote['body']);
}

//

Just imagine endpoint URL returns correct information, with a valid & correct v2.0.0 .zip/release

Answer 1

Thanks Tom J Nowell! That led me down the right direction and I've been able to update successfully. Here's what I did:

1. Re-structured my repo to match:

|-- .git
|-- .gitattributes
|-- .gitignore
|-- README.md
|-- package.json
|-- plugin-name
    |-- plugin-name.php
    |-- src
        |-- ...

2. Code new version in a new branch, merge into master

3. From command line, cd into root of directory above, & run:

git archive -o <plugin-name>-<major>.<minor>.<patch>.zip --format=zip --prefix=<plugin-name>/ HEAD:<plugin-name>

4. Upload the to S3 <bucket>/wp-plugin/v<plugin-major-version>/<zipfile>.zip, e.g.

<bucket>/wp-plugin/v2/plugin-name-2.0.0.zip

5. ???
6. PROFIT