I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve experienced many instances where the Auto-update feature in WordPress fails to update either a plugin or WordPress itself.
The solution to this problem is remarkably simple, and hopefully will be fixed soon by the WP core developers in an upcoming release. The problem seems to be caused by a messy previous upgrade in which files are left in a temporary “upgrade” directory with the wp-content directory.
In order to solve the problem, you simply need to delete the “upgrade” directory in it’s entirety and then try the upgrade again. I’ve yet to find an instance on several blogs across multiple machines where this didn’t solve the problem.
Jules, is is possible that your webhost has a firewall blocking the outward connection to wordpress.org? It might be worth asking them.
Hi All,
I had the same problem and this tips did not for me as well, but after disabling all plugins WordPress Update accomplished eventually. Try that i hope it will for you, too.
Very cool I have this exact problem. While deleting the upgrade folder allows me to auto update my plugin. I have to delete the upgrade folder every time I upgrade the plugins.
Thanks for the tip very helpful!
Larry
i have the same problem exactly, thanks :) i can upgrade my wp now
thanks John !!!! worked like a charm !!!!!
amazing… tried everything…..
thank you.. the annoying failed was killing me, but your easy fix worked :)
Wonderful! Upgrading my plugins was a pain before, now it is simple.
Thanks so much!
Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!!! Not only was my WP failing to update but it was running super slow. That worked like a charm and now all is back to normal…. Phew!!
Thanks alot. I was beating my head against the wall furiously trying to figure this out. Nothing was working. It never occurred to me that the problem would have been old data in the “upgrade” folder.
After deleting this folder and re-installing 2.9.2 I was able to reinstall all of my plugins and my site is running fine now.
Thanks again.
Wow, this totally saved me from a sleepless night. Thanks
This hasn’t fixed a failed auto update to version 3.0 from 2.9.2. I deleted the upgrade folder and the wordpress-3[x].tmp files that were in wp-content and it still stalls at ‘Unpacking the update’.
I’ve never had problems upgrading anything before.
I am in the same boat as a number of these folks. I have no trouble updating any of my plugins. It’s just when I do the Core update that it stalls at “Unpacking the update.”
I have deleted the upgrade folder, but that did not fix the problem. I try a new update and go to th new upgrade folder it made and I can see all the files, seemingly unpacked.
Any ideas?
I had a similar problem to some of you here where the automatic update would stall or error out in some way. I found that the upgrade worked fine on all but one of our customers sites (all on same server with same permissions).
The site in question had used 37mb of its 50mb quota. I increased this to 70mb and hey presto, the upgrade worked fine.
I am assuming that the upgrade process requires a certain amount of disk space to upload the upgrade file and if its not there it will just fail.
Hope this helps someone!
My problem was also that there was not enough room within my storage quota. Deleted some files, then upgrade worked perfectly.
Yes, I had to expand the disk quota for my ftp and everything worked then.
Wow, that really worked like a charm. I am using WordPress 3.0.
didnt work for me. it is saying “Cant find root directory”
This worked for me, but I’m still trying to figure out why it fails periodically.
The other problem with WordPress updates is the .maintenance file that gets left behind which can cause some headaches. It’s as if the WP upgrades can’t clean up after themselves in some cases.
It may have something to do with the version of PHP your server is using. I was having the same problem, but found this fix:
Add this to the top line of your .htaccess file: AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
I ALWAYS have trouble with the automatic updates- and so I end up waiting too long. This did the trick, thanks!
Looks like I spoke too soon, even thought I CHMODed everything I still get issues with files :P
Hey,
I had this problem. Just google a file ‘class-wp-upgrader.php’ upload it to the directory ‘wp-admin/includes’ overwriting the existing file
This will sort it out,
Cheers
Karl
This was the only post that helped me for months…thank you! I think I found a way to not have to even delete my upgrades folder, so I wanted to post this.
I was having the same problems trying to upgrade the WordPress version or plugins. After changing file permissions, manually deleting my upgrade folder, increasing the amount of PHP memory that could be used, I finally found out that the problem was with the ftp server that my host uses (well, the problem actually involved a WordPress bug, but it was solved by asking my host to change my ftp server temporarily to proFTP until I finished my upgrades.)
I wrote a detailed blog about it: http://arcandangle.com/wordpress-upgrade-cannot-copy-ftp-permission-issue-in-layman-terms
Hope this helps others!
Thank You Darcy for sharing! I tried everything else that I could find and no love until I found your fix!
Hello guys, and thanks so much for this informative thread, very appreciated. I only have a quick, basic, totally newbie question: After you deleted the “upgrade” folder, do you need to re-create a new, blank one, or will the system do that for you? Thank you.
Your suggestion worked like a charm!!! I deleted the upgrade folder and it worked! Thanks, you rock!
This is interesting – I’m on WordPress 3 and am having this issue, however, no upgrades folder is created, instead I am getting a tmp file created in the wp-contents folder called wordpress-3.tmp, also if I’m trying to upgrade akismet I get a tmp file called akismet-1.tmp.
I’ve tried deleting these but to no avail. No sure if anyone else is experiencing this.
Thanks for the post John.
Following my previous comment I’ve managed to sort out the problem and thought I would share it. Basically I manually upgraded the WordPress install.
All I did was upload all files EXCEPT the wp-content folder and went to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade
The whole thing took about 20 minutes.
Hope this helps.