This page focuses on upgrading an existing WordPress Installation. We’re assuming your web server is already configured to serve your blog and that you have administrative access to the blog root directory. Links to additional installation/upgrade documentation can be found here.

Download the latest WordPress release from wordpress.org.

As of this writing the latest release is 3.0.3.

The download release-archive has links to MD5 checksums, so you can verify the integrity of the file you pull down.

Disable any plugins through the web interface before upgrading.

Rename your current wordpress install. For the sake of this document, we’re assuming its in the default, wordpress directory.

mv -fR wordpress wordpress.bak

Explode the tarball with:

tar -xzvf wordpress-3.0.3.tar.gz

Rename the resulting wordpress directory if required.

Restore the wp-config.php:

cp wordpress.bak/wp-config.php wordpress

As wordpress notes on their upgrade page, the file structure under wp-content — plugins, themes and uploads needs to be copied manually. Also, the uploads directory doesn’t exist by default, nor to the subdirectories labeled by year, month, and upload number that wordpress creates automatically. Assuming you only have uploads for 2007, you can create the directory structure you need with the command

mkdir -p wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007

Then copy all the uploads:

cp -fR wordpress.bak/wp-content/uploads/2007/* \ wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007

Restore any plugins.

cp wordpress.bak/wp-content/plugins/*.zip \ wordpress/wp-content/plugins

unzip -d wordpress/wp-content/plugins \ wordpress/wp-content/plugins/*.zip

Set the appropriate directory and file permissions.

chown -R uid:gid wordpress