Updater from Drive

A WordPress plugin that keeps your installed plugins up to date from ZIP packages kept in a Google Drive folder you own and control.

Point a site at a publicly shared Drive folder, and it will work out which packages are newer than what is installed and install them.

How it works

Matching is done from package file names, so a check costs a single listing request and never downloads anything speculatively:

plugin-folder-name-version.zip     e.g. contact-form-7-6.0.1.zip

A file name is a claim, not a fact. So immediately before installing — when the archive has been downloaded anyway, and the check is therefore free — the ZIP is opened and its plugin header is read. If the contents do not match the name, nothing is installed and the reason is logged:

Nothing was updated, and it is worth checking your Drive folder. The file "x.zip" is named as if it were an update for A, but it actually contains a different plugin (B).

Safety rules

• Never downgrades: a package is installed only when strictly newer.
• Never installs a package whose contents disagree with its name.
• Installation goes through the WordPress core upgrader, not a hand-rolled unzip.
• Automatic daily checking is off until switched on.
• Only read-only access to Drive is ever used.

Setup

1. Share your packages folder in Google Drive as "Anyone with the link" (Viewer).
2. In the Google Cloud Console, create a project, enable the Google Drive API and create an API key. This is free and needs no billing account.
3. In Settings → Drive Updater, paste the key and the folder address.

The API key can be kept out of the database with a constant in wp-config.php:

define( 'UFDRIVE_API_KEY', 'AIza....' );

Updating the plugin itself

This plugin is not in the WordPress.org directory, so it checks its own distribution directory for new versions and reports them to WordPress in the usual way — the update then appears on the Plugins screen like any other.

The version lives only in the package file name, so there is no manifest to keep in step with the packages. The archive is still opened and checked before it replaces a working install.

Point it somewhere else with a constant:

define( 'UFDRIVE_UPDATE_URL', 'https://example.com/my-plugins/' );

or with the ufdrive_update_source_url filter.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.3 or newer
• PHP 7.4 or newer, with the zip extension

Notes

Shared drives are supported. Packages stored in a shared drive are invisible to the Drive API unless every request opts in, which this plugin does.

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later