Morpheus: A New WordPress Update Mirror

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We’ve seen a big situation unfold in the WordPress universe recently. Every conversation we have had with agency customers—and indeed the wider community—have been centred around the fear of losing access to updates. 

Some agencies want to migrate 1000s of sites immediately, to avoid them breaking. While we make it easy, migrating sites is no joke and should not be undertaken overnight. There are surely others who are completely unaware that all this is happening at all. 

Things have stabilised currently, however the fear lingers. This is why we created Morpheus.

Introducing Morpheus

It has been said often enough: updates are critical to security. They are vital to protect millions of sites from hackers. Hackers will inevitably take advantage of out-of-date sites, putting many businesses at risk. 

Morpheus is a host-agnostic, updates service for all WordPress sites. 

It works by mirroring all the updates from the WordPress repository. Essentially, it uses it as a source of truth.

If your site ever loses access to the WordPress repository, you can use Morpheus in exactly the same way—never losing access to updates again.

How Morpheus works

Morpheus is fully compatible with WordPress updates API. 

It is designed to be super lightweight, usable from the smallest server instance. It will work in 2 parts: 

1. The server

This code will offload the work done by WordPress.org. It is a mirror, and thus works exactly in the same way. It is fully compatible with the official updates API. 

We are hosting it, but anyone can host it themselves. Whether you are a web host, agency, or own a single WordPress site, you can run Morpheus easily, and with minimal resources. 

2. The plugin

The second part is a plugin you can install on your site. You will then continue to get updates on whichever host you are using. 

By default, the plugin will connect to WordPress.org for updates. However, if for any reason, your site loses access to the repository, the plugin will fallback to the Morpheus server instead.  

You can view and configure these options from your site backend.

Looking to the future

We have lots of improvements planned for the future. 

For now, the update service supports the updates API, as this is the need of the hour. It is also currently limited to English-language updates. However, we are working to support all languages supported by WordPress eventually. 

Our aim is to support the whole API, so that no functionality is ever lost. This will include installing new plugins, and other features.

We will add more documentation to the Morpheus Github repository.

Fully open source

Morpheus code is completely open source, and available to the entire community under an MIT Open Source licence. Anyone can replicate the code, and modify it to their liking. 

As always, we welcome suggestions and improvements, which we can integrate into the official repo. 

No one can replace wp.org

WordPress.org is a staggering resource, and it is no joke to run it. There is a lot of upkeep, in terms of maintaining and improving it. In short, it is a tremendous resource that is completely free to use. 

Morpheus is a small way to mitigate that load, so that one organisation doesn’t bear the entire cost of running it.

The intent behind Morpheus is to allay community fears and foster peace of mind. We hope that it will forestall knee-jerk reactions with respect to losing access to the WordPress repository.

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