Radio Ramblings

I use Wordpress to manage a couple of sites all on the same server. As a matter of course I’ve set the directories up as Git repositories so that I can easily see if anything has been changed when I don’t expect it (for example, if someone has exploited a vulnerability.)

For those who don’t know, Git is a source code manager.  The purpose of it is to allow teams to work together on writing software, and let them edit the same files at the same time without a problem.  They also include tracking of what has changed in the files.

To make my life easier, I’ve also got the wordpress codebase in a separate directory. I started with version 2.5, so at the time I did:

cd /var/www
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xzf latest.tar.gz
cd wordpress
git init
git add -a
git commit -a -m “Wordpress 2.5″

I then set a site up by doing:

mkdir /var/www/md1clv.com
cd /var/www/md1clv.com
git init
git pull ../wordpress

I follow the procedure for setting up a new Wordpress site, and then commit all the changes.

Today I noticed that Wordpress 2.5.1 had been released. Upgrading is pure simplicity - I just need to do:

cd /var/www/wordpress
rm -r *
cd ..
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xzf latest.tar.gz
cd wordpress
# Check whether any new files have been added:
git status
# If so add them with “git add”
git commit -a -m “Wordpress 2.5.1″

Then for each site I just need to go into the site’s directory and run “git pull ../wordpress” then visit the upgrade.php page to complete the upgrade.

I love things that make my life simple!

(The next step to make things even simpler will be to find a Git repository of the Wordpress code, and pull from that instead of my own local wordpress directory.)