How to use AspireUpdate to update WordPress and plugins

6 hours ago 1

If you have been familiar with the WordPress community for more than a year, there is no way you haven’t heard about the whole WordPress drama that started with Matt Mullenweg taking shots at WP Engine at an event they sponsored. The situation escalated very quickly, with the Automattic CEO quicking long-time contributors from the WordPress Slack channels, banning any person that criticized his actions on X, and finally blocked WP Engine from updating from the official repository.

Although many kept supporting Mullenweg for a long time, kicking out WP Engine from the repository showed he cared little about the end users, but really cared about keeping control. With a little research, it became obvious the WordPress Foundation was pretty much useless and that WordPress.org was under the sole proprietorship of a “benevolent dictator”. It provoked several reactions, AspirePress being one of the most concrete projects to counter the toxic influence of the WordPress founder.

What’s AspirePress?

AspirePress is a community that came together to address the issue of the above mentioned single point of failure in WordPress: the WordPress.org installation and update repository. The security risks involved by this single point of failure created a big risk on the reliability and credibility of the WordPress project.

In a bit over a year, AspirePress has already come up with several useful tools to solve the issue at hand:

  • AspireCloud: an API server for WordPress, partially implementing the api.wp.org specifications, and proxying the rest.
  • AspireSync: a tool to download a copy of all plugins from the WordPress ORG directory.
  • AspireUpdate: a plugin that allows for rewriting the URLs used to fetch updates from WordPress.org to some other endpoint.
  • AspireExplorer: which allows users to browse and search the software repository in much the same way as they would on wordpress.org to find extensions for WordPress.

What is AspireUpdate?

AspireUpdate is a WordPress plugin that gives WordPress site owners the power to install and update WordPress plugins through alternative repositories powered by AspireCloud. If an update is not available in the AspireCloud instance, the plugin will automatically revert to the WordPress.org repository.

How to install AspireUpdate?

As for most WordPress plugins, AspireUpdate is very straightforward to install and use:

1 – Go to the project’s GitHub page and download the latest version, then install it by uploading the zip file, then activate it.

2 – Go to settings > AspireUpdate, then fill the settings according to your needs. You will most likely use AspireCloud as an API host, but you can also use another host. If your host requires an API Key, enter it in the appropriate field.

3 – Test it by going to the plugins install page of your WordPress site, opening your browser’s dev tools and installing a WordPress plugin. Under “Network” > “Fetch/XHR”, you should see that the requests are made to AspireCloud or whatever other API you added in your settings.

At WP Expert, we have added this plugin to our test sites and the website you are currently browsing for now, then we’ll extend the usage to our client sites as soon as we are sure it doesn’t bring any risk to them. This type of initiative is extremely good and should be saluted by the community.

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