Disable WordPress 3.7 Auto Updater

30 May 2016 on WordPress

With the release of WordPress 3.7 comes some fancy core updates, mainly focusing on security & stability.

What a lot of the WordPress community are excited about is the addition of automatic updates. For many this is a great feature where they know their websites are always going to be running the most secure version & hopefully stop any attempts at hacks, but I believe the automatic updates also introduces problems.

Plugin compatibility:

For me, I like to test each plugin thoroughly to make sure it’s compatible with my version of core, with automatic updates I would no longer be able to do this & have to rely on the maintainers to keep everything up-to-date, to me, this is too risky.

Version control:

Building web applications on a daily basis I use GIT, this allows me to keep track of code, roll back to previous versions, have backups & check the differences between versions of code; having automatic updates enabled will cause conflicts when deploying.

Please note: WordPress have added a feature into the automatic updater to look for a variety of version control files e.g. .git, .svn & if it finds these files the updater is automatically cancelled.

Disable automatic updates manually:

To disable updates manually all you need to do is add the following line to your wp-config.php file.

# Disables all core updates:
define('WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false);

For more information you can read the fantastic article by Andrew Nacin over at wordpress.org.