Automatic Updates For Private And Commercial Plugins
Last updated on June 26, 2015.
Since time immemorial, only plugins hosted in the official WordPress.org plugin directory have supported automatic updates. Now, I’ve written a PHP library that you can use to add automatic update capabilities to any plugin. Public, private and commercial plugins alike – all can now enjoy the benefits of automatic update notifications and one-click upgrades.
The custom update checker integrates closely with the upgrade system already built into WordPress, producing a seamless user experience. Observe :
Download
- Client library (requires WP 3.2 or later)
- Example plugin
- Example metadata file
- GitHub repository
License
This library is released under the MIT License and is distributed free of charge. If you find it useful, consider making a donation.
Quick-start Guide
This section describes the quickest way to get automatic updates working for your plugin. Here’s what you’ll need to do: create a metadata file for your plugin, host it somewhere publicly accessible, and tell the update checker where to find it.
Lets start with the metadata. Copy the JSON code below into a new file and replace the placeholder values with your plugin’s info.
{ "name" : "My Cool Plugin", "slug" : "my-cool-plugin", "download_url" : "https://example.com/plugins/my-cool-plugin.zip", "version" : "2.0", "author" : "John Smith", "sections" : { "description" : "Plugin description here. Basic HTML allowed." } }
(This is the minimum amount of data required to make automatic updates work. In most cases, you will probably want to add a couple more fields. See the metadata docs for a full list.)
Most of the fields should be pretty self-explanatory, with one possible exception – the “slug”. WordPress expects all plugins that support automatic updates to have a unique textual identifier called the “slug”. Normally, slugs are assigned by the official plugin directory. For a private/commercial plugin that’s hosted elsewhere you’ll have to make something up. If unsure, just use the plugin’s file name without the “.php” extension (my-cool-plugin/my-cool-plugin.php becomes my-cool-plugin).
Upload the metadata file you just created to your web server. It doesn’t matter where exactly you put the file or how you name it. The important thing is for its URL to be accessible from wherever someone might install your plugin.
Next, copy the “plugin-update-checker” directory from the client library archive to your plugin’s directory. Then fire up your favourite code editor and add the following lines to the top of your plugin file:
require 'plugin-update-checker/plugin-update-checker.php'; $MyUpdateChecker = PucFactory::buildUpdateChecker( 'https://example.com/path/to/metadata.json', __FILE__, 'your-chosen-slug' );
If you followed my advice and used the plugin’s file name as the slug, you can omit the third parameter of the PucFactory::buildUpdateChecker()
call.
Tip: Sometimes you’ll run into a situation where another active plugin is also using this update checker. As a result, there could be several different versions of the library loaded at the same time. The above code snippet will always give you the latest available version. This can be a problem if your plugin expects an older version and is not API-compatible with the latest version.
To use a specific version of the update checker (e.g. the one included with your plugin), instantiate the PluginUpdateChecker_x_y
class directly. Replace x
and y
with the major and minor version numbers:
//Use version 2.0 of the update checker. require 'plugin-update-checker/plugin-update-checker.php'; $MyUpdateChecker = new PluginUpdateChecker_2_0 ( 'https://example.com/path/to/metadata.json', __FILE__, 'your-chosen-slug' );
And that, believe it or not, is it.
The PluginUpdateChecker class will handle the rest. It’ll check the metadata file every 12 hours and, if it discovers that a new version has been released, twiddle the right bits in the undocumented WP API to make it show up as a standard upgrade notification in the “Plugins” tab. Assuming you’ve provided a valid download_url
, users will be able to install the update with a single click.
Tip: When creating the ZIP file for an update, put all plugin files inside a directory. The directory name should match the plugin slug. Do not put the files at the root of the ZIP archive – it can cause subtle bugs and errors when someone ties to install the update.
The rest of this post will be devoted to a more in-depth discussion of the update checker class and the metadata format.
The PluginUpdateChecker class
This class is the core of the update checker. It’s also the only part of the updater that you should need to deal with unless you decide to extend the library yourself.
Class constructor
All configuration settings should be specified by passing them to the PucFactory::buildUpdateChecker() factory method, or directly to the PluginUpdateChecker constructor. Both takes the following parameters:
$metadataUrl
– The full URL of the plugin’s metadata file.$pluginFile
– The path to the plugin’s file. In most cases you can simply use the __FILE__ constant here.$slug
– The plugin’s ‘slug’. If not specified, the filename part of $pluginFile (sans “.php”) will be used as the slug.$checkPeriod
– How often to check for updates (in hours). Defaults to checking every 12 hours. Set to zero to disable automatic update checks.$optionName
– Where to store book-keeping info about updates. Defaults to “external_updates-$slug”.
checkForUpdates()
Manually trigger an update check. This is especially useful when you’ve disabled automatic checks by setting $checkPeriod (above) to zero. This method takes no parameters and returns nothing.
addQueryArgFilter($callback)
Register a callback for filtering query arguments. Whenever the update checker needs to retrieve the metadata file, it will first run each filter callback and attach the query arguments that they return to the metadata URL. This lets you pass arbitrary data to the server hosting the metadata. For example, commercial plugins could use it to implement some kind of authorization scheme where only users that have the right “key” get automatic updates.
The callback function will be passed an associative array of query arguments and should return a modified array. By default, the update checker will add these arguments to the metadata URL:
installed_version
– set to the currently installed version of the plugin.checking_for_updates
– set to 1 if checking for updates, absent otherwise (i.e. when loading data for the “Plugin Information” box).
This method takes one parameter – the callback function.
addHttpRequestArgFilter($callback)
Register a callback for filtering the various options passed to the built-in helper function wp_remote_get that the update checker uses to periodically download plugin metadata. The callback function should take one argument – an associative array of arguments – and return a modified array or arguments. See the WP documentation on wp_remote_get for details about what arguments are available and how they work.
This method takes one parameter – the callback function.
addResultFilter($callback)
Register a callback for filtering plugin info retrieved from the metadata URL.
The callback function should take two arguments. If the metadata was retrieved successfully, the first argument passed will be an instance of PluginInfo (see the source for a description of this class). Otherwise, it will be NULL. The second argument will be the corresponding return value of wp_remote_get (see WP docs for details). The callback function should return a new or modified instance of PluginInfo or NULL.
This method takes one parameter – the callback function.
Metadata format
The automatic update system uses a JSON-based file format to describe plugins. Essentially, the entire file is one big JSON-encoded object (AKA hash-table or associative array). Each field – or array key – represents a piece of information about the latest version of the plugin. The full description of all available fields is here.
For the sake of simplicity, both general metadata and update-related information are stored in the same file. If this is undesirable, you can replace the plain JSON file with a script that checks for the presence of the the “checking_for_updates” query parameter and emits just the update-related fields if its set to “1”.
Notes
Your plugin must be active for updates to work. The update checker is just another piece of PHP code loaded and run by your plugin, and it won’t be run if the plugin is inactive.
One consequence of this that may not be immediately obvious is that on a multisite installation updates will only show up if the plugin is active on the main site. This is because update notifications usually appear in the network admin, and only plugins active on the main site are loaded in that case. The main site of a WordPress network is the one that was created first and has the path “/” in the Sites -> All Sites list.
Related posts :
Thanks for the link. It looks like the .zip file doesn’t have a “7abc” directory. Instead, the top level of the archive looks like this:
7hek.zip/
- __MACOSX
- core
- plugin-updates
- 7hek.php
Some Mac users have reported similar problems before. What tool did you use to create the ZIP? Consider switching to something that displays the directory structure correctly.
Oh well, that explains it than!
When unzipping it shows as “7abc” as top level folder. Really strange.
I created the zip through “Coda”. I guess it uses MacOSX-standard zip engine though!
I’ll try with some zip tool and get back to you with the results!
Some ZIP software automatically creates a new folder for the extracted files even if the .zip file itself doesn’t have a top level folder. Perhaps there’s a way to turn that off in Coda?
As for alternative tools, 7-zip (free) and WinRAR (paid) are good options on Windows/Linux. Both of them also have Mac OS X versions, though I haven’t tried them myself.
Case closed!
I had “The Unarchiver” installed. Number 1 zip tool in appstore. I uninstalled it now and the zips seams to be created correctly now.
Plugin update works, and it also fixed a bug i had with the theme updater! (it created a new folder named 7abc.temp and didn’t remove the .temp-part.)
Thanks for great support and awesome code, mate!
[…] also have plugins using the plugin update checker via Janis / w-shadow because they are not hosted on WordPress.org … so how do other plugin developers track […]
[…] also have plugins using the plugin update checker via Janis / w-shadow because they are not hosted on WordPress.org … so how do other plugin developers track […]
Nice work Janis, very sweet. I switched the .json file to .php and pass back the server name from the plugin to verify the user has registered, and if not I don’t pass the download_url for those who care about blocking out non-registered, non-payers from free uploads.
If not anyone can edit the plugin and get back to the download_url that isn’t protected. Hope this helps others if you care about this stuff, and maybe Janis has a better idea as I do not claim to be an expert, just hacking my way through life:).
My partial example from the plugin:
$MyUpdateChecker = PucFactory::buildUpdateChecker(
‘http://example.com/plugin-helpers/info.php?callback=get_info&sv=’.$_SERVER[‘SEVER_NAME’],
__FILE__,
‘my-cool-plugin’
);
I think I mentioned this in an earlier comment, but I do something similar in my own plugins. Each customer gets a unique license key. The plugin then passes the key and site URL to the update server, which verifies the key and only outputs the download_url for paying customers. It also tracks a couple of other things, like max. sites per user.
Hi prepare something also for the themes?
See this post.
Is the script affected by the newly released XSS issue?
https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/04/security-advisory-xss-vulnerability-affecting-multiple-wordpress-plugins.html
Good question. I don’t think it is affected. While the update checker does use add_query_arg() in a couple of places, it uses its own base URL(s) instead of the current URL. The URLs do not contain user input. Also, any URLs that are output in HTML are escaped.
Will this class be updated to use WordPress’s new way of updating plugins?
As far as I know, that’s just a UI change. The class should work as-is.
Ahh you are correct, it just wasn’t working on my localhost, works perfectly online though!
Would be great if this was in a plugin itself (like the envato one)…
I’m not really a fan of that approach since it requires the user to install a second plugin. It’s better for plugins to be self-contained.
Thanks for the great code and explanation. I’d love to read more about how you implement the unique license key for each customer.
Good article, and excellent solution for providing automatic updates. I have to disagree about plugins having to be self-contained. I always disliked the “large monolith” architecture of WordPress plugins, which causes many of them to be large due to the many libraries they include. Not to mention the conflicts that arise when two plugins load different versions of the same library.
A modular system, such as the one used by many frameworks is a much better choice. The difficulty, with WP, arises from the fact that it doesn’t include any dependency or requirement checking mechanism, therefore developers have to implement their own (like I’ve done). It’s not a simple task, but, once the framework is in place, its advantages become clear.
As for “installing a second plugin”, that’s not the end of the world. This can also be automated, to a certain extent, leveraging WordPress internal classes, leaving the user with one extra click to make (and this is just to keep him involved, as the click could be skipped altogether). 🙂
Hi,
I’ve been using the plugin updater for a while now but since the release WP 4.2 a warning message appears in the WP Plugin Dashboard if you have debug = true.
Notice: Undefined index: plugin in /home/your_site/dev/wp-admin/includes/update.php on line 281
Any ideas?
Thanks!