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You can always just grab a tarball, uncompress it locally, and then connect to the server with your favorite SFTP client to upload the new files to the server.

You can always just grab a tarball, uncompress it locally, and then connect to the server with your favorite SFTP client to upload the new files to the server. It's not exactly elegant but it is possible. I did that more than once back in the good ol' days before the fancy schmancy automatic updates. After you do it a few times, though, you'll probably just give up and modify the file permissions so that WordPress can update itself at which point... If the user that WordPress (or the web server stack, I suppose) is running as has write permissions on the directory where WordPress lives, it can update itself directly without having to FTP to localhost or whatever. Of course, typically we'd say it would be a bad idea for the application to be able to do that but blah blah risk assessment blah blah trade-offs blah blah ... For a long while, this was a widely accepted/standard way of hosting multiple customers on a shared web server, using something like suexec+php-cgi or (even better, IMO) mpm-itk. Then, each customer's WordPress site would run under its own uid/gid in order to isolate them from one another. A single customer could break their own instance or allow it to get hacked over and over again, but at least it couldn't get to other users' sites. I'm not sure how the large shared web hosts are handling this nowadays or if anything has even changed. (Edit: After reading your other comments, mgkimsal, it's obvious that you already know all of this but I'm not going to delete/edit my comment now.)

mgkimsal 9y ago
no worries - thanks. I'm sometimes deeply aware and involved in it, then move on to other areas, and don't have to think about it for a while. the apparent moves to nginx/fpm in the php as a 'default' for many situations has, I admit, perplexed me a bit - my muscle memory has not adapted to newer ways of dealing with this approach. So many of the problems in WP stem from the extreme 'hackability' from the early days, and a resistance to push for more security by default (the lack of ability to even attempt to install updates via ssh is, imo, a good example).

mgkimsal 9y ago

no worries - thanks. I'm sometimes deeply aware and involved in it, then move on to other areas, and don't have to think about it for a while. the apparent moves to nginx/fpm in the php as a 'default' for many situations has, I admit, perplexed me a bit - my muscle memory has not adapted to newer ways of dealing with this approach. So many of the problems in WP stem from the extreme 'hackability' from the early days, and a resistance to push for more security by default (the lack of ability to even attempt to install updates via ssh is, imo, a good example).