17. Automate & Updates

If Automate is not already activated on your site, click the “Get Started” button on the Automate tab to open the Quick Start setup wizard

The Quick Start setup wizard includes the following steps:

• Auto Update – Choose whether you want to automatically update everything or select which plugins and themes you would like to automatically update after the setup wizard is complete. Note that if Auto update all is selected in the setup wizard, any plugins or themes added later will default to auto update as well. If I’ll do it manually is selected, any plugins or themes added later will default to ignored and would need to be updated manually or set to auto update.
• Schedule Checks – Set how frequently Automate should check for updates.
• Auto Backup – Choose whether you want to automatically back up your entire site before each update. Note that on 3rd-party hosted sites, enabling this option will install our Snapshot plugin on the site.
• Safe Update Check – This scan will tell you if your site is down and show any visual change on your selected pages after updates have completed.
• Safe Update Alerts – Receive an email notification if Safe Update Check detects a change equal or more than the percentage value you set.
• Email Updates – Receive email summaries of Automate updates.

After running the Quick Start setup wizard, you can make changes to any of the selected configurations in the settings tab.

A detailed overview of each of these features is covered in the Automate Settings chapter below.

The Automate Activity Log tracks all your automated updates.

Activity Log information includes:

• Date – Day the action was run
• Time – When the action was run
• Action – What action was taken (Backup, Safe Update check, Plugin, Theme, Core)
• Note – Version number pass/fail message where applicable
• View result – Opens safe update check results
• What’s new – Opens available changelog for updated item

The Automate Settings tab opens all the available tools for managing scheduling, Safe Updates, backups, and alerts.

Schedule Checks

Schedule Checks defaults to check for updates every 6 hours, except if you are a free Hub user. See Free Hub Restrictions for details.

If you do not want to run checks at that frequency, clicking on the schedule opens a popup for customizing the time and days Automate runs update checks. As an example, you may not want to run backups over the weekend. Setting weekdays and a time, limits your update checks to only weekdays.

Click Close to close the module without changing your Automate schedule or Save to save your schedule.

Automate will run at a time as close as possible to the time you set here. However, there may be a variable delay depending on how busy the system is. If it does not run at the selected time, it will reschedule itself to try again 20 minutes later.

Note that the timezone used is the one you set on your Account page under Details & API Key.

Also note that plugins may occasionally be updated automatically on your site via native WordPress cron before Automate cron is triggered. You can of course disable automatic updates for any plugin in your site’s wp-admin. However, we strongly recommend that you keep that enabled for the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin to ensure up-to-date connectivity with the Hub, regardless of the schedule you set here.

Auto Backup

Choose if you want to set Auto Backups to automatically back up your entire site before each update. You can find Automate backups on the Backups tab.

Safe Update Check

Safe Update will take a screenshot of your pages before and after an update, compare the images, and if changes are detected notify you of potential problems. This scan will tell you if your site is down and show any visual change on your selected pages.

Click the Safe Update Check option to open a modal:

• Home Page – Choose Home Page to set only your Home Page for Safe Update scanning.
• Custom – Click the Add Page icon to add a custom URLs to run Safe Update scans on (You can add up to 4 custom URLs to scan)
• Inactive – Choose the no option to continue without setting up Safe Update.

Click the Save button when you’re done, or Close to exit without saving your changes. Click the blue toggle at the top of the modal to disable the feature if no longer needed.

Safe Update Alerts

If you choose to use Safe Updates you will be asked to set when notifications are sent based on change percentage. By default, the change percentage is set to 25%. Receive an email notification if Safe Update Check detects a change equal or more than the selected percentage value.

Click and drag the slider to the desired percentage of change. Then add the email address(es) of the recipient(s) who will receive notifications of any changes that are greater than that threshold.

Note that if Auto Backup is enabled, and the Safe Update runs into any trouble, like 3xx, 4xx or 5xx errors, the email it sends you will include a Restore Backup button. Clicking that button will take you to the backups screen in your Hub where you can easily restore the automatic pre-upgrade backup (or any other) if needed.

Email Updates

Choose if and when Automate reports are created and emailed to the designated recipients.

Click the drop-down menu to view the scheduling options.

Options include:

• Every update
• Daily summary
• Weekly summary
• Monthly summary
• Do not send email summary

Email Recipients

This is the email address Automate reports are sent to. Click the address to change the recipient. This address will default to the account admin.

Deactivate Automate

Clicking the Deactivate link at the bottom of the settings screen will open the Deactivate Automate module. Confirm you want to deactivate Automate with the Yes button or click Cancel to close the module without saving your changes.

Automate will alert you if updates are disabled for any plugin, theme or core WordPress. Updates are disabled if there are 3 consecutive update attempts that fail for that specific plugin, theme or core.

It’s important to note that even if you have Email Updates turned off, Automate will still send a notification to the address(es) you have set in the Email Recipients section if updates are disabled for any plugin, theme or core WordPress. However, if you have set Email Updates to email you with Every Update, the above emails will not be sent. This is to avoid sending you duplicate emails, as the failed updates information will already be included in the reports sent to the address(es) you have configured in Email Updates.

If Automate itself is disabled due to multiple consecutive failures, you will be emailed regardless of how Automate is configured.

Possible Solutions

Define Your Site URLs

If Automate fails repeatedly on your site, it may be due to a 301 redirect that is interfering. You can try adding the following constants to your wp-config.php file, before the line that says “That’s all, stop editing”. Be sure to change the URLs in each one to the correct ones for your site.

define( 'WPMUDEV_HUB_HOME_URL', 'https://your-site.com/' );
define( 'WPMUDEV_HUB_SITE_URL', 'https://your-site.com/' );
define( 'WPMUDEV_HUB_ADMIN_URL', 'https://your-site.com/wp-admin' );

Allowlist WPMU DEV IP Addresses

Add WPMU DEV IP addresses to the allowlist in your firewall, security plugin, or CloudFlare account. See WPMU DEV IP Addresses for more info.