WordPress 3.7 Automatic Upgrades Proving to Be Reliable

The first WordPress 3.7 Release Candidate was sent out into the wild last Friday. So far it’s been testing very well. The flagship feature of this release is the ability for WordPress to automatically update itself, as highlighted in the customary haiku:

WordPress three seven
A self-updating engine
Lies beneath the hood

Automatic background updates seems like a daunting feature to launch across millions of blogs, but WordPress 3.7 includes code to roll back a failed automatic upgrade. Even so, Nacin tweeted yesterday that after 25,000 updates to RC1, there hasn’t been one single rollback. So far it looks like the automatic background updates for security and minor releases is proving to be remarkably reliable.

Nacin has done everything in his power to determine points of failure within the feature but so far it’s been holding up nicely:

We’ve tried all sorts of things to trip up the updater in WP 3.7, like changing file perms, simulating network issues, having no disk space.

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) October 18, 2013

Short of unplugging the server halfway through, I’m not actually sure it’s possible for a background update in WP 3.7 to critically fail.

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) October 18, 2013

Currently two emails are being sent out when the automatic upgrades are successful: one for debugging and the other standard email that all users of 3.7 will receive. Once 3.7 is officially released you will no longer get the debugging email. However, there is a filter that you can use to keep it turned on if you like.

Jeff recently polled Tavern readers to see how they will be implementing the automatic updates on their sites, as many readers previously had expressed reservations. At this time it seems that only 1 in 4 people polled will be disabling automatic updates completely, while the remaining 75% are open to using them to varying degrees. The results of Nacin’s testing of RC1 should inspire even more confidence. If all goes well, it looks like we should have the official WordPress 3.7 release sometime this week.