I’ve shut off FTP access to my server a while back, since FTP passwords are passed in plaintext over the net which is A Bad Thing™. For the occasions that I would need to update WordPress via its web interface, I would start up the FTP daemon so that I could use WordPress’ auto-update feature, and then shut it back down after I was done. Not that big of a hassle, but it required me to login into my server before doing anything from the web interface which was one step too many.

I discovered that WordPress has built-in support for updating via SSH2 if PHP has the PECL SSH2 library installed. Following is a quick summary of how to get it running.

The PECL ssh2 library requires libssh2 which I downloaded and then compiled painlessly with a

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Once libssh2 was compiled and installed, I installed the PECL ssh2 library via

$ pecl install -f ssh2

The -f flag is to force the install since ssh2 is still in beta & you’d otherwise get a warning like

Failed to download pecl/ssh2 within preferred state "stable", latest release is version 0.11.0, stability "beta", use "channel://pecl.php.net/ssh2-0.11.0" to install

After installing ssh2 via pecl, i edited the php.ini file (located at /etc/php.ini for me) to tell PHP to load this extension

extension=ssh2.so

and then restart apache afterwards (via apachctl, service httpd restart, or whatever is appropriate for your system) so that the library would be available to PHP.

After apache comes back up, you should see a new option (SSH) in the wordpress upgrade page (which applies to plugins as well).

BTW, if you’re on a Red Hat Fedora system and/or use yum, you might be able to just pull the libssh2 rpm from yum instead of compiling it:

$ yum install libssh2
$ yum install libssh2-devel
$ yum install libssh2-docs

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