When WP admin shows a plugin update but WP-CLI doesn’t — making automation see proprietary updaters
You open the “Updates” page in WordPress admin and see that Elementor Pro / ACF Pro / vk-blocks-pro have updates available. Then you run wp plugin update –all from your automation, and those exact plugins don’t update. The asymmetry — “the admin sees it; WP-CLI doesn’t” — traces back to how WordPress detects updates and how premium plugins layer proprietary update mechanisms on top of that. Here’s the mechanism and how an automation tool can adapt. WordPress update detection is held by a transient cache WordPress doesn’t decide “is there an update?” on every request. It caches the answer in the wp_options table as a transient, valid for up to …