How to test a point release before the end of the release party?

Paul Biron, one of the contributors to the Beta Tester Plugin mentioned during today’s WordPress 5.9.1 RC release party:

remember, you can’t update to point-release RCs via the Beta Tester plugin until the Nightlies are built at the end of the party.

Paul Biron

I should be able to test a point-release via wp-cli, though. But how do I do this with Local WP?

I right-click on the site and select Open Site Shell. That will open your terminal window.

Once that’s open you can use the command

wp core update https://wordpress.org/wordpress-5.9.1-RC1.zip

Now you can open the site in your browser and test a few things to make sure that update works.

After participating in release parties, I was wondering how many smoke tests I should be able to contribute. I can test any update from and earlier WordPress version to the newly released one by using

• Beta-Tester Plugin,
• Core Rollback plugin and
• LocalWP -you only need to set up one site.

From Andy Fragen I learned, you can only get back to older WP core versions in Core Rollback by using PHP 5.6.x. PHP 7.x will limit you. Using a block theme will limit you to 5.9