Smutty Bear Creative Studio releasesself-updates

Smutty Studio is a privately distributed WordPress plugin. Its update client verifies the release checksum and every file in the ZIP, makes a backup, installs the update, performs a version check, and rolls back a failed install.

Publishing updates

This repository includes a tag-driven release pipeline in .github/workflows/publish-release.yml. Once its one-time setup is complete, the normal release process is:

1. Change the plugin and update both version declarations in smutty-bear-studio.php.
2. Commit and push the change.
3. Push the commit to the repository's main branch.

The workflow creates the matching tag, builds the exact plugin ZIP and release feed, and attaches both to a GitHub Release in this repository. The release ZIP contains the repository's GitHub feed URL, so WordPress will offer subsequent versions through its normal plugin updater without feed configuration. No command line, signing key, or GitHub secret setup is required.

Existing installations and custom feeds

An installation older than 0.2.18 must be given the feed once under Studio → Settings → Private update-feed URL: https://github.com/OWNER/REPOSITORY/releases/latest/download/release-feed.json, replacing OWNER/REPOSITORY with this repository's GitHub location. Once it installs 0.2.18 or later, official release packages carry that default. The setting remains available as an override for mirrors or private feeds. Leave the bearer token empty for public GitHub releases; a private repository needs a separate authenticated release host instead.

There are no repository secrets and no separate release server. The workflow publishes updates rather than writing directly into the live plugin directory, preserving checksum checks, backups, health checks, and rollback. Enable WordPress auto-updates for the plugin if releases should install without an administrator clicking Update now.

Build a release locally

The same artifacts can be built without GitHub Actions:

tools/build-release.sh https://updates.example.com/smutty-studio

Artifacts are written to build/release/. The script refuses malformed versions, mismatched plugin version declarations, and a dirty working tree (set SBS_ALLOW_DIRTY=1 only for local testing).