A Guide to Updating WordPress, Plugins and Themes

For example, the AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED constant seen above can be replaced by adding the following line in the functions.php file of your theme, or in a plugin:

<span class="token function">add_filter</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">'automatic_updater_disabled'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">'__return_true'</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>

This will disable automatic updates.

Other filters can enable or disable specific automatic updates. For each filter, your function must returntrue if you want to enable the corresponding type of update, or false otherwise.

<span class="token comment" spellcheck="true">// Disable automatic minor updates</span>
<span class="token function">add_filter</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">'allow_minor_auto_core_updates'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">'__return_false'</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>

<span class="token comment" spellcheck="true">// Enable automatic major updates</span>
<span class="token function">add_filter</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">'allow_major_auto_core_updates'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">'__return_true'</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>

<span class="token comment" spellcheck="true">// Enable development updates</span>
<span class="token function">add_filter</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">'allow_dev_auto_core_updates'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">'__return_true'</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;

</span>

.. Automatic updates for plugins and themes are disabled by default. To enable them, you can add a filter into the functions.php file of your theme or in a plugin, just like you can for WordPress core updates.

<span class="token comment" spellcheck="true">// Enable automatic updates for plugins</span>
<span class="token function">add_filter</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">'auto_update_plugin'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">'__return_true'</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>

<span class="token comment" spellcheck="true">// Enable automatic updates for themes</span>
<span class="token function">add_filter</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">'auto_update_theme'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">'__return_true'</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>