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WordPress.org Plugin Readme/Assets Update

Deploy readme and asset updates to the WordPress Plugin Repository.

This Action commits any readme and WordPress.org-specific assets changes in your specified branch to the WordPress.org plugin repository if no other changes have been made since the last deployment to WordPress.org. This is useful for updating things like screenshots or Tested up to separately from functional changes, provided your Git branching methodology avoids changing anything else in the specified branch between functional releases. It is highly recommended that you use a stable branch where you only merge readme/asset commits in between larger functional merges that only occur when preparing for a release (often implemented as trunk vs. develop).

Because the WordPress.org plugin repository shows information from the readme in the specified Stable tag, this Action also attempts to parse out the stable tag from your readme and deploy to there as well as trunk. If your stable tag is trunk or a tag that does not exist in the tags subfolder, it will skip that part of the update and only update trunk and/or assets.

Important note: If your development process leads to a situation where trunk (or other specified branch) only contains changes to the readme or assets directory since the last sync to the plugin directory and those changes are in preparation for the next release, those changes will go live and potentially be misleading to users. Usage of this Action assumes a fairly traditional Git methodology that involves merging all changes to trunk when functional changes are ready and that this seemingly unlikely situation will therefore not happen in your repo; there are no safeguards against syncing changes based on readme/asset content, as that cannot be predicted.

☞ This Action is meant to be used in tandem with our WordPress.org Plugin Deploy Action

☞ Check out our collection of WordPress-focused GitHub Actions

Configuration

Required secrets

SVN_USERNAME
SVN_PASSWORD

Secrets are set in your repository settings. They cannot be viewed once stored.

Optional environment variables

SLUG - defaults to the respository name, customizable in case your WordPress repository has a different slug or is capitalized differently.
ASSETS_DIR - defaults to .wordpress-org, customizable for other locations of WordPress.org plugin repository-specific assets that belong in the top-level assets directory (the one on the same level as trunk). If you want to skip updating assets because you don't have an assets directory, set SKIP_ASSETS : true
README_NAME - defaults to readme.txt, customizable in case you use README.md instead, which is now quietly supported in the WordPress.org plugin repository.
IGNORE_OTHER_FILES - defaults to false, which means that all your files are copied (as in WordPress.org Plugin Deploy Action, respecting .distignore and .gitattributes), and the Action will bail if anything except assets and readme.txt are modified. See "Important note" above. If you set this variable to true, then only assets and readme.txt will be copied, and changes to other files will be ignored and not committed.

Example Git Workflow

For this example, Git's main branch (the default on new repositories) corresponds directly to Subversion's trunk and is considered the "release" branch.

In general, the expected workflow when using the WordPress.org Plugin Deploy Action is as follows:

Create a new branch for feature x
When the feature is ready for release, merge it onto main
On main, update the readme.txt to reflect the change, e.g.: set the "Stable tag", update the changelog, etc. (although some of this could be done on the feature branch prior to merging)
Update any assets in .wordpress-org
Tag main with the new version number, e.g.: 1.1.0

At this point, the deploy action will push the tag as a Subversion branch to the WordPress svn repository and your new version will be live.

And this is where this action comes in…

As main is our "release" branch, changes to anything other than the readme.txt and .wordpress-org can only be made live by tagging main.

If, however, you need to update the readme.txt or assets folder (.wordpress-org) for any reason, you should do that directly on main and then push your changes. This action will verify that only the readme.txt and .wordpress-org contain changes and if so, will push them directly to trunk on the WordPress svn repository.

Example Workflow File

name: Plugin asset/readme update
on:
  push:
    branches:
    - trunk
jobs:
  trunk:
    name: Push to trunk
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - name: Install SVN ( Subversion )
      run: |
        sudo apt-get update
        sudo apt-get install subversion
    - name: WordPress.org plugin asset/readme update
      uses: 10up/action-wordpress-plugin-asset-update@stable
      env:
        SVN_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.SVN_PASSWORD }}
        SVN_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.SVN_USERNAME }}

Known issues

It would be more efficient to additionally use the paths filter for the push action to reduce the number of runs. So far in testing it is possible to limit it to pushes that include readme/asset files as specified, but not ones that only include those files. The Action itself still needs to run as written because it compares the totality of changes in the branch against what's in SVN and not just the contents of the current push.

Changelog

A complete listing of all notable changes to WordPress.org Plugin Readme/Assets Update are documented in CHANGELOG.md.

Contributing

Want to help? Check out our contributing guidelines to get started.

Support Level

Active: 10up is actively working on this, and we expect to continue work for the foreseeable future including keeping tested up to the most recent version of WordPress. Bug reports, feature requests, questions, and pull requests are welcome.

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