Finding available updates for plugins

Note: Finding available updates for plugins on a site is simply a special case of listing available plugins (see previous chapter).

To show which plugins on a website have updates available, use –listupdates:

wordshell mysite --listupdates

Example output:

mysite  wordpress-https                2.0.4 (3.0.3) WordPress HTTPS
mysite  wp-featured-content-slider (-) 2.4 (2.5)     WP Featured Content Slider

In that example output, the four columns are: 1) the site 2) the plugin 3) the installed (and available) plugin versions 4) the plugin description. The (-) next to a plugin name means that the plugin is not available in the WordPress plugin directory at wordpress.org.

Or to find all plugins on all websites:

wordshell all --listupdates

Or to find all websites for which there is an update available for a particular plugin, e.g. “akismet”:

wordshell all akismet --listupdates

WordShell can find updates for all plugins that match one of these three criteria:

  1. The plugin is in the WordPress plugins directory
  2. You previously installed the plugin using WordShell
  3. You have copied a zip of the new plugin into your WordShell directory, by default ~/.wordshell/customimports.plugin

Advanced usage

  • Since listing available updates is simply a special case of listing plugins in general, all the options available for listing apply. In particular, you can use –active or –inactive to list only plugins that are in the corresponding state. e.g. Find updates for active plugins on all sites:
    wordshell all --listupdates --active
  • This is a good command to script with cron; e.g. once a week you could run it to send you a report on all available updates.

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