Bluehost have recently open sourced their in-house script that can be used to automatically update WordPress websites.
Sometime back, Bluehost had noticed that majority of support requests and issues related to hacked websites arose from WordPress users who were running obsolete versions of WordPress.
As such, Bluehost came up with an ambitious yet effective plan: their wrote a script that would automatically check for outdated versions of WordPress on Bluehost’s servers, and update them accordingly. The script, coded in Perl and working via WP CLI, would first take a backup of the website, then update WordPress and restore data, and finally perform a check to see if everything is working normal. If not, it would restore the backup.
After successful implementation, Bluehost noticed that support requests dropped by 18%. In fact, this method of Bluehost received praise from Matt Mullenweg himself in his State of the Word 2015 address last year in December.
Now, you can play with that script too — Bluehost have released it as open source on GitHub, and you can grab it for your projects or other ventures.
Having been used to update millions of WordPress websites, this particular script has a great success rate and is therefore, really useful for anyone looking for such a piece of code to run automated updates.
Find it on GitHub here.