It's oddly difficult to find the "no content" package of a WP release when you need to manually update a site ⸺ at least it was the last time I went poking around for it.
Why would I need to do this when WP offers a perfectly good (and ofttimes automatic) update system? Well, it's usually for one of two reasons:
- The site is hosted by a cheap unreliable service.
- The site is behind a VPN and won't connect to other servers.
The "no content" version is what the update process would download if it could, so you might as well use it too. How to find it? You can get a list of the past 25 releases by checking the core version API.
Behold: https://api.wordpress.org/core/version-check/1.7/
That will return a JSON response with everything you need. Below I've chopped out the 24 others that aren't the most recent version:
{
"offers": [
{
"response": "upgrade",
"download": "https:\/\/downloads.wordpress.org\/release\/wordpress-6.7.2.zip",
"locale": "en_US",
"packages": {
"full": "https:\/\/downloads.wordpress.org\/release\/wordpress-6.7.2.zip",
"no_content": "https:\/\/downloads.wordpress.org\/release\/wordpress-6.7.2-no-content.zip",
"new_bundled": "https:\/\/downloads.wordpress.org\/release\/wordpress-6.7.2-new-bundled.zip",
"partial": false,
"rollback": false
},
"current": "6.7.2",
"version": "6.7.2",
"php_version": "7.2.24",
"mysql_version": "5.5.5",
"new_bundled": "6.7",
"partial_version": false
}
]
}Note: If you're using Chrome, the JSONVue extension is nicer and more visually appealing than the default "pretty print" option.
The first item, offers.0.download, is the current full release. Below that you'll find offers.0.packages.no_content, the one we're after, and some others. In the end, the URLs are always the same and follow this format:
https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/wordpress-X.X.X-no-content.zipThat means they can be "hacked" to get at what you want directly, but that's less fun than digging through some JSON!