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Plugin deactivated after Automate ran

Today Automate tried to update Search & Filter Pro from version 2.5.8 to 2.5.9 on one of our sites. It generated an error, although the plugin was updated (see below) when I inspected the back-end.

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So the error seems to be incorrect, which happens sometimes with plugins that are not distributed through wordpress.org. But what bothers me is that the plugin was disabled afterwards. This is just unacceptable because it can break a (part of the) site.

Mon, 5 Jul 2021 11:48:40
  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Dominique !

    Apologies for the inconvenience caused by this issue!

    I’ve checked the logs we have on our end and those confirm what you’ve mentioned and additionally there’s a notice that the initial screenshot has failed due to the site returning an Internal Server Error, which may have caused the plugin to not update and stay deactivated.

    I’ve shared the details with the Automate team for additional feedback – we’ll update you about that as soon as we hear from them.

    Kind regards,
    Pawel

  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Dominique !

    A bit of feedback from the Automate team:

    During the update process the plugin is deactivated by WordPress itself – that’s what’s happening also when you update the plugin manually. However, if after that there is some issue with the server/site, like in this case – there was an Internal Server Error, which can mean multiple things, the plugin will stay deactivated. Our system will try to reactivate an updated plugin only if there’s success.

    In cases where something went wrong, we won’t attempt reactivation to avoid potential further issues. As you probably already know, in case of WordPress and PHP that’s better if there’s an issue as activating a potentially faulty plugin can cause a crash of the entire site, which would be far worse than not having a part of functionality. Unfortunately there’s no way to predict when those issues happen as there are simply too many variables. Therefore Automate runs additional checks and it will also send you an email notification to let you know of the issue and allow you to take action on it.

    There’s one common scenario for those cases – if the theme or some other plugins are using functions from a specific plugin and they don’t check if the plugin is active. That was happening more often in cases of WooCommerce addons for example – they expected WooCommerce to be there all the time, so when someone tried to update Woo, the site crashed because the addons still tried to run Woo functions.

    It may be something similar so I’m sharing for additional background. Nowadays that doesn’t seem to be happening anymore fortunately as developers check whether a dependent plugin is active and if not – they gracefully bail out (which is the correct way to do things).

    From what we see, this should be a one-off occurrence, but please let us know in case this happens again.

    Kind regards,
    Pawel

  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Dominique !

    Ah yes, I remember that ticket and I see there was an ongoing discussion about the issues there. Those were all shared with the Automate team.

    As I mentioned before, premium plugins like WPML-extensions, Duplicator Pro, SEOPress Pro and Gravity Forms-addons are almost always erroring (“newest version already installed”). So I guess that’s problematic.

    In those cases I think we can do something, I’ll share my thoughts about this with the Automate team. Since the premium plugins have already been updated then there’s no need to consider this as an actual error.

    The reason here is that the sites sync current data with the Hub twice per day and it may be that the plugins got already updated by themselves or through the WordPress auto-update feature. Then Automate comes and since the data wasn’t refreshed yet, it will try to run the updates once more, resulting in the “already at the newest version” message. For now this will have to remain as is, but I’ll let the team know about your feedback.

    Kind regards,
    Pawel

    • Noeste IJver
      • Recruit

      Hi Paweł,

      I ran through the last Automate round (from yesterday morning, we run Automate weekly) and found the following websites with errors. As the error messages are mostly in Dutch I can’t be sure that it’s the error that you’re asking for but I think it is.

      Here’s a list of all sites that errored, with error message and plugin.

      “De plugin is bijgewerkt tot de meest recente versie.” (same as: “The plugin is at the latest version.”?)
      – jongmoederofzwanger.nl (Duplicator Pro)
      – blogs.sap.nl (Duplicator Pro)
      – notulenvanhetonzichtbare.nl (Duplicator Pro)
      – tedxtilburg.nl (Duplicator Pro & Yoast SEO)
      – shortcut-fietskoeriers.nl (SEOPress PRO)
      – ligarus.nl (Duplicator Pro)
      – schenkeveldadvocaten.nl (Duplicator Pro)

      “Update failed for an unknown reason”
      – houtepenbv.nl (Elementor Pro)
      – kuinkuin.nl (Search & Filter Pro)

      “Nonce check failed”
      – blogs.sap.nl (Yoast SEO)

  • Noeste IJver
    • Recruit

    Just today I experienced this problem again. Automate ran an update round for the website brabantadvies.com and afterwards Elementor Pro and Advanced Custom Fields Pro were deactivated. This caused the front-end of the website to be completely gone.

    Please WPMUDEV, this has to be improved. Apart from Defender Pro and Smush Pro, The Hub and Automate are the sole reason that I’m still paying for a subscription. If these tools are not as reliable as advertised, I probably won’t feel like renewing my subscription anymore.

    Here’s what happened last night in Automate’s side.
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