Plugin Autoupdate Filter

Filters whether autoupdates are on based on day/time and other settings.

What's this?

This is a plugin that the WordPress Special Projects team uses on many of their partner sites in order to help manage autoupdates in a responsible way. For example:

1. It defaults autoupdates to be on. Keeping plugins up-to-date is one of the the first lines of defense against malicious attacks and technical debt.
2. It provides various mechanisms by which we can turn off autoupdates, such as during specific days/times, for specific plugins, or centralized settings which can turn off all autoupdates.

Usage

1. Download the .zip file from https://github.com/a8cteam51/plugin-autoupdate-filter/releases
2. Via the wp-admin plugins page on your WordPress site, upload the zip file and activate the plugin

Notes on functionality

This plugin filters the core auto_update_plugin functionality to always run autoupdates during specific hours. It doesn't respect any toggle settings prior to activating this plugin, and is also respected by Jetpack autoupdate settings (the Jetpack autoupdate toggles may still reflect something different, but are not meaningful if this plugin is activated).

It's a good idea to load this as a normal plugin (rather than an mu-plugin), so that it can be deactivated easily by a site admin, in case autoupdates needs to be paused during troubleshooting, etc.

By default, the plugin always returns true for autoupdates Mon-Thu 6am-7pm Eastern, and Fri 6am-3pm Eastern. The 13 hour days are because the cron event which checks for autoupdates only runs every 12 hours, and so if the window isn't more than 12 hours at least once during the week, we run the risk of missing updates completely.

Centralized settings

By default, this plugin checks an endpoint set up by the WordPress Special Projects team to get centralized settings. If you use this plugin and aren't part of the team, then we recommend you either set up your own endpoint or remove that portion of the code.

The payload supports:

• disable_all to disable all automatic updates.
• canary_sites to bypass release-delay behavior for selected sites.
• disabled_plugins to disable automatic updates for specific plugins across connected sites.

Support

This plugin is unsupported; use at your own discretion

If you have a problem or suggestion, please make an issue in the repo here: https://github.com/a8cteam51/plugin-autoupdate-filter/issues

Feel free to fork and/or create a PR!

Filters

Set your own hours/days

If you'd like to customize the times and days, you can filter them. e.g.:

function custom_autoupdate_hours( $hours ) {
  return array(
    start      => '10', // 6am Eastern
    end        => '23', // 7pm Eastern
    friday_end => '20', // 4pm Eastern on Fridays
  );
}
add_filter( 'plugin_autoupdate_filter_hours', 'custom_autoupdate_hours' );

function custom_autoupdate_days_off( $days_off ) {
  // if you don't want updates to run on Fri, Sat, or Sun at all
  return array(
    Fri,
    Sat,
    Sun,
  );
}
add_filter( 'plugin_autoupdate_filter_days_off', 'custom_autoupdate_days_off' );

Set holidays

If you'd like to set windows of time for no updates, you can filter them. e.g.:

$holidays = array(
  'christmas' => array(
    'start' => '2021-12-23 00:00:00',
    'end'   => '2021-12-26 00:00:00'
  ),
);
add_filter( 'plugin_autoupdate_filter_holidays', 'custom_autoupdate_holidays' );

Disable autoupdate completely for specific plugins

If you still need to turn off autoupdates for a specific plugin, you can filter auto_update_plugin at a priority greater than 10, and prevent specific plugins from updating.

NOTE: If you do this, please name your function disable_autoupdate_specific_plugins, so that we can add appropriate notices in wp-admin, e.g.

function disable_autoupdate_specific_plugins ( $update, $item ) {
    // Array of plugin slugs to never auto-update
    $plugins = array (
        'akismet',
        'buddypress',
    );
    if ( in_array( $item->slug, $plugins ) ) {
         // Never update plugins in this array
        return false;
    } else {
        // Else, do whatever it was going to do before
        return $update;
    }
}
add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', 'disable_autoupdate_specific_plugins', 11, 2 );