As a new developer using wp-scripts, I expect the zip package generated by plugin-zip to be compatible with plugin updates.

[nicolasgalvez]

What problem does this address?

I am confused about the differences between the plugin-zip command and the zip requirements for plugin updates.

Issue

As a new developer using wp-scripts, I expect the zip package generated by plugin-zip to be compatible with plugin updates.

Actual behavior

1. The plugin-zip adds files to the root of the zip file.
2. The plugin update system requires a directory with the same name as the plugin in the root of the zip, and the plugin files should be inside that. Running the update on the backend fails.

Details

I expect the zip package to have the tree specified in the best practices for plugin development page.

/plugin-name
     plugin-name.php
     uninstall.php
     /languages
     /includes
     /admin
          /js
          /css
          /images
     /public
          /js
          /css
          /images

I made a plugin called example-plugin using wp-scripts. I then used the plugin-zip command to generate a zip file and uploaded it to my site using the admin backend as usual. It worked as expected.

However, when I tried to update my plugin after checking in a new version, it failed because the zip file did not have a directory named example-plugin.

When I examined the zip file, I noticed the tree was like this:

 plugin-name.php
 uninstall.php
 /languages
 /includes
 /admin
      /js
      /css
      /images
 /public
      /js
      /css
      /images

I looked to see if there was an option to pass to plugin-zip to alter the behavior but didn't find one in the documentation. I looked at the source code on github but didn't see any way to do this.

As a workaround, in my plugin's github action, I unzip the package after running plugin-zip (to take advantage of the file filtering from package.json), create a directory, move the files, and then zip again.

Here's the relevant part of my action for reference:

      - name: Build JS
        run: npm run build

      - name: Run wp-scripts plugin-zip # Use the wp-scripts command to create a zip with only the files needed.
        run: npm run plugin-zip

      - name: Unzip the plugin # This is a workaround because the plugin-zip command doesn't place the files in a directory with the plugin name.
        run: |
          unzip $PLUGIN_NAME.zip -d $PLUGIN_NAME
          rm $PLUGIN_NAME.zip

      - name: Re-zip the plugin # The WP updater expects the plugin files to be in a directory with the plugin name.
        run: zip -r $PLUGIN_NAME.zip $PLUGIN_NAME

Now the plugin will update when I update it from the admin/plugin page.

Note that I am using yahnis-elsts/plugin-update-checker which I have used before. But I also tried this by writing an update checker manually and am not confident that I did it right because it made a bunch of directories in the plugins directory like example-plugin-1.

What is your proposed solution?

Ideally there is already a way to do this that I don't know about. In that case, I would update the documentation to show how to specify a root directory in the zip package.

Otherwise, I would suggest adding a flag to plugin-zip to allow this behavior such as plugin-directory=name. where the name is optional, and the directory name might be pulled from the last portion of the name in the package.json file: "name": "my-namespace/example-plugin",

Or, maybe yahnis-elsts/plugin-update-checker is no longer the correct tool to update plugins. Perhaps there could be a link to an example plugin with the update code.

I'm happy to take a stab at doing this, since I want to get involved with core development. Thanks everyone!