Amixa Blog – Website & IT services in Western Pennsylvania

If you want your WordPress install to do auto-updates (in a Windows Server based hosting setup), you need to do one simple step.

Edit the hosts file.

Put a local IP in there for the domain name of the site.

Save the changes.

Example:

10.5.5.5  www.whatever-the-site-is.com

Re-log into WordPress and go to dashboard-updates and in there it should tell you “future updates will be automatically applied”

Why is all of this needed?  WordPress uses PHP CRON and that is reliant on the server being able to find the local website.  Therefore it is necessary to put a hard-coded IP in the hosts file so the CRON job can “see” the wordpress site.  Without the hosts entry the website will resolve to the external IP of the site, and you will have an unreachable IP issue and auto-update won’t work.