The Ease of Automating WordPress Plugin Releases

A few years ago, my buddy Brad tweeted a small problem he was having with WordPress and I collaborated with Andrew Norcross to make a plugin to solve it. Today, another tweet from Brad encouraged me to take a look at the plugin again.

What is your favorite WordPress plugin? Lesser known the better!

Lot of great plugin suggestions so far! We're sharing favorite plugins on the WordPress Friday this week. Join us! #WPFriday https://t.co/7mXAl7W58s

— Brad Williams (@williamsba) April 19, 2023

I checked up on BRAD and noticed that the tested up to was out of date and decided to make this easier to fix. I decided to install two GitHub actions from 10up – WordPress Plugin Deploy and WordPress.org Plugin Readme/Assets Update.

Setting up these two actions took only a matter of minutes and required six steps.

1. Add a .github/workflows folder to the top level of the github repository
2. Add assets.yml with a basic config to only run on changes to main
3. Add deploy.yml so that when a new version is tagged, it gets pushed to WordPress.org automatically.
4. Copy the assets from SVN into a new .wordpress-org folder.
5. Create a .distignore file listing the things I didn’t want to be copied over to svn.
6. Create repository secrets with my svn username and password.

As a part of this, I noticed that my github repo had a small change I had never pushed to WordPress.org, so I released 0.2 of BRAD. I also saw small readme typo, so I fixed that as well.

I love SVN and think it is great but GitHub is an easy platform for tracking issues and collaborating. If I can remove manual steps from a process, it’s going to make it more foolproof for the future. These two GitHub Actions do just that. I highly recommend using these for all of your WordPress Plugins.