---
title: How to test a point release before the end of the release party?
date: "2022-02-17"
author: "Birgit Pauli-Haack"
url: "https://icodeforapurpose.com/how-to-test-a-point-release-before-the-end-of-the-release-party/"
categories: ["Site News"]
---

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`

![](http://localhost:undefined/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Screen-Shot-2022-02-17-at-16.31.33.png)
*Screenshot terminal window. *

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,](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/)
- [Core Rollback plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/core-rollback/) and
- [LocalWP](https://localwp.com/) -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**

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