Yesterday, I celebrated a quiet 5-year anniversary of the Gutenberg Nightly. The first version was released on October 15, 2020.
The Gutenberg Nightly is a almost-daily plugin build from Gutenberg repository trunk branch.
Here I explain, who would want to use it, and why, especially on the eve of major core releases, it might be helpful
This download page is for people who would like to alpha/beta test Gutenberg, but
- Don’t want to do install NodeJS and npm ?
- Don’t want to use the command line ?
- Don’t want to download 2.7 Gigabytes in 232,740 files ? 1
A friend of mine asked me, “Every two weeks is not fast enough for you”? On October 19, 2020, there were 250 new commits made since the last release (9.1.1) and before the release of 9.2. Any issue you might file, might get a response like “Could you please try it in trunk, I think it was already fixed.”
On the shoulders of giants
Riad Benguella, lead developer of Gutenberg, helped me figure out the Gutenberg plugin build process for my fork. Andy Fragen, long-time core contributor and developer of the WordPress Beta tester plugin was my very patient mentor. You can use his GitUpdater plugin (free version) to keep Gutenberg Nightly updated on your test site over all almost-daily releases.
Two years ago, I also added a blueprint so the Gutenberg Nightly can be used with WordPress Playground.
Sarah Gooding, then editor at the WPTavern wrote about it, too:
Set Up a Gutenberg Test Site in 2 Minutes with the Gutenberg Nightly Plugin
In December 2020, I finished the Node CLI course by Mr. Amad Awais, and used my newly aquired skills to streamlined the process of the release and distribution. In 2024, I teamed up with Cursor to close the gaps to make it fully automated with one command.
- That was the number five years ago. ↩︎
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