// the find
YahnisElsts/plugin-update-checker
A custom update checker for WordPress plugins. Useful if you don't want to host your project in the official WP repository, but would still like it to support automatic updates. Despite the name, it also works with themes.
A drop-in PHP library that grafts WordPress's native update UI onto plugins and themes you host outside of wordpress.org. Point it at a JSON file, a GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket repo, or your own server and it handles the polling, notification banners, and one-click upgrade flow. Anyone shipping a commercial or private WordPress plugin should know this exists.
The VCS integrations are genuinely useful — passing a GitHub repo URL and calling one method is all you need; the library figures out whether to use releases, tags, or a stable branch. The versioned namespace scheme (v5p7) means multiple plugins in the same WordPress install can bundle different versions without collisions, which is the classic PHP bundling nightmare solved correctly. It ships a Debug Bar integration that lets you force an update check without jumping through hoops, which saves real time during development. Translation coverage across 20+ locales is complete and maintained.
No built-in license management at all — the README says so explicitly and points at a five-year-old open issue. If you need to gate updates behind a license key, you're writing that yourself. The tag-based release flow has a known blind spot: it doesn't filter pre-release tags, so pushing a `v2.0-beta1` tag will offer it as a stable update to all your users. The self-hosted JSON format is documented in a Google Spreadsheet rather than in the repo, which is a fragile place for spec documentation. The `master` branch gets special-cased behavior in the VCS checkers (falls back to tags/releases before reading the branch header), which is a subtle gotcha if you're used to trunk-based development.