The Perennial Programmer

Although my public blogs are hosted with an ISP, I also have WordPress installed on my home machine for the sake of hacking and development. I have a full setup on my home machine with Apache web server, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. (I also have PostgreSQL and J2EE tools, but that’s another story.)

I had installed all of these smoothly using APT, but I had grown a bit frustrated that the Ubuntu repositories still only had version 2.2 of WordPress while I was using 2.5 on my public site. Thanks to a tip on the Ubuntu Tutorials blog and info on the WordPress.org site, I decided to switch to using Subversion to manage upgrades rather than waiting for new versions to show up in the Ubuntu repositories.

These are the steps I took:

1. I saved a copy of my wp-config.php file for safe-keeping.
2. I uninstalled WordPress using the Synaptic Package Manager.
3. I recreated the directory it had been installed in using mkdir, and executed:
4. sudo svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ . (note the trailing period to install in the current directory).
5. I edited the wp-config.php file to put the settings from the saved one back in.
6. I opened http://localhost/<blog-path>/wp-admin/upgrade.php in my browser.

That was it! Worked smoothly. Now I can just use subversion to manage upgrades without waiting for them to show up in the Ubuntu repositories.