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Comment by ozh | Hacker News Reader

As someone who owns multiple WP installs, I have added "define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true );" to all my wp-config.php files so that all my installs automatically self update with ALL future updates, minor & major

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It is great in theory. In practice, the last auto-update caused a WSOD on my site without any helpful debug log (both on WP and server log) until I manually disabled a (popular) plugin by editing its php file.

I wonder how a less tech-savy person would have resolved that. Even being tech-savy, I had to ask someone for help.

Updates of core and plugins are always very scary to me.

It's a system that's based on trust, but the auto-update that is active in WordPress has saved millions of sites of getting hacked in the last few weeks: https://ma.ttias.be/in-defence-of-wordpress/

As soon as something major breaks by those auto-updates, the trust is over and a lot of users will disable it. That would be a shame indeed, because besides a couple of WSOD's some users may experience, it's an extremely powerful feature.

There is also "define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'minor' );" which should break a lot less.

As someone who hasn't bothered with WP in a long while, is there any way to do this safely whilst still using 3rd party plugins and themes?

Depends on the themes and the plugins. Basically: not really, but if you've used a small subset of themes and plugins you should be okay.

How does it check for new versions? Could it be MITM'd? :-)

I've personally no idea, but I hope you asked yourself those questions.

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