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Folders missing in theme or plugin after Automate update.

We’re having some pretty major issues with running updates from The Hub. We updated a large number of sites today and ran into internal server issues on a number of them. On one site there it was caused by a whole folder missing from the theme after the update. This same theme has updated fine on other sites. On another site, a folder was missing in the page builder plugin we use on that site (Thrive Architect). The only thing we can pin it down to is that something is going wrong when The Hub runs the updates.

A whole FOLDER was missing from inside the theme folder, after the update. We’ve manually replaced the theme folder completely with the previous version from the backup, and then ran the update again – this time from within the WordPress dashboard, and it worked fine. But when we previously ran it from The Hub screen, 4 out of 7 sites that use this same theme broke when updating the theme. But 3 out of 7 worked fine. On all the sites that broke there was a missing folder in the theme files after the update. So it seems that running updates from The Hub has a greater possibility of something failing. Does that seem possible? I can’t send you URLs of a broken site and a good site now, because we’ve fixed them all. Thoughts on this?

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 13:26:01
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Josh

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for reaching out to us.

    The way Automate/The Hub updates themes and plugins on site isn’t much different than a regular update from the site dashboard. What happens is:

    – The Hub communicates with the site through WPMU DEV Dashboard

    – WordPress detects that there are updates available and WPMU DEV Dashboard sees that

    – WPMU DEV Dashboard “tells” The Hub that there are certain plugins/themes on site that are out of date

    – when Automate is run it sends a message to WPMU DEV Dashboard on site “please update this plugin/theme”

    – WPMU DEV Dashboard triggers built-in WP updater

    – the WP performs update, just like you would hit “update” manually in the site back-end.

    So, the Automate doesn’t “push” or “upload” anything to your site, it only “hits the button” in your name.

    I’m not sure about the Thrive theme specifically but there are, unfortunately, some cases when this might not work perfectly fine with some premium plugins/themes that either require licence key to be registered and that key is not added or where such plugin/theme actually requires it’s own additional “updater”. It might be some “built-in” code or a separate plugin but the thing is that they are sometimes either not hooking to a WP core updater at all or are doing it in a way that it makes it work only when directly triggered from the site dashboard.

    However, in both these cases this should stop the update entirely rather than causing a “missing folder”. Such a “missing folder” in case of any update (of any plugin or theme) is something that I’d rather tend to associate with either some temporary connectivity issues or server going down temporarily or some resource related error (such as e.g. 500 Internal Server Error or some gateway timeout error) occurring.

    Could this be related to The Hub then? In theory, it could but in a bit different way than you’d expect. For example, if automate is set to perform backups/safe updates, it could theoretically cause temporary overload on a site – because backup is quite a resource intensive process – and that in turn could result in such issue. But I’m not sure if this is actually happening.

    Could you please tell me:

    – this is only about specifically Thrive theme or some other themes/plugins were also affected?

    – it was always the same folder missing in theme, right?

    – you mentioned that it happened previously too – did it happen on the very same sites as well on other sites then and other sites now?

    – are those affected and unaffected sites all on the same server/hosting accounts or different ones?

    – do you have “Auto backup” enabled in Automate for these affected sites and those unaffected?

    – do you have “Safe Upgrade Check” enabled in Automate (respectively: for affected and unaffected sites)?

    Let me know, please. Hopefully this will help me narrow down possible issues in order to solve the problem.

    Kind regards,

    Adam