automatic wordpress update with subversion and wptool

i’m updating and upgrading my wordpress installations per cronjob with the cool wptool from Christiane Ruetten, published in German “c’t magazin fuer computertechnik”.

This little script uses the http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/ as subversion base.
Today this location is not available and the update terminates with the following failure:

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/wordpress/tags/2.8'
svn: PROPFIND of '/wordpress/tags/2.8': could not connect to server (http://svn.automattic.com)

Don’t know, if this is forever or a temporary failure.
If wordpress.org moved their svn repository to core.svn.wordpress.org completely, the wordpress wiki must be updated!

To update wordpress installations from the “new” core.svn.wordpress.org repository with wptool, some slight modifications are necessary:

1. go to wordpress installation directory and relocate the svn repository

cd /usr/local/your_wordpress_dir
svn switch --relocate http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8 http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8

2. update the wptool script

#svn_base='http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/'
#lang_base='http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/'
svn_base='http://core.svn.wordpress.org/'
lang_base='http://core.svn.wordpress.org/'

3. run the upgrade again

./wptool upgrade /usr/local/your_wordpress_dir
...
Updated to revision 11719.

Success!

howto upgrade wordpress under ubuntu

it is very easy to upgrade wordpress with Ubuntu:

step 1

download current wordpress version (today 2.6).

step 2

backup old database scheme and old wordpress files


$ mkdir /backup/wp/20080717
$ mysqldump -u user -p DB_SCHEMENAME > /backup/wp/20080717/blog_dump.sql
$ tar cfz /backup/wp/20080717/blog_backup.tgz /YOURDIR/wordpress


step 3 unpack new wordpress software


$ cd /tmp
$ tar xfz latest.tar.gz
$ cp -avr /tmp/wordpress/* /YOURDIR/wordpress/
$ rm -rf /tmp/wordpress /tmp/latest.tar.gz