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.

I checked up on BRAD and noticed that the tested up to was out of date and decided to make this easier to fix.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.