Using TGMPA with GitLab’s CI artifacts

TLDR: set some headers, see below.


TGMPA is a WordPress plugin that helps you to manage your theme dependencies. Just imagine your users experience: instead of ask them to check a README doc that recommends installing various plugins (and no way of enforcing them to do so), this panel will show up everywhere they go:

A basic config would look like this:

add_action('tgmpa_register', function () {
  // if the plugin is not hosted on WP, add * at the begining of the URL
  $plugins = [
    "simple-taxonomy-ordering" => "",

  $required_plugins = [];

  $config = [
    'is_automatic' => true,
    'dismissable' => false,

  foreach ($plugins as $plugin_name => $plugin_url) {
    $required_plugins[$plugin_name] = [
      'name' => $plugin_name,
      'slug' => $plugin_name,
      'required' => true,
      'force_activation' => true,

    if (substr($plugin_url, 0, 1) == '*') { // just a trickery to allow specifying a ZIP url
      $required_plugins[$plugin_name]['source'] = substr($plugin_url, 1);
    } else {
      $required_plugins[$plugin_name]['external_url'] = $plugin_url;

  tgmpa($required_plugins, $config);

GitLab CI

On almost evey project, I’m using composer for various PHP deps, nodejs for various JS deps and a few Grunt or Gulp tasks. Obviously enough, I don’t want to keep in my repo a huuuge vendor or node_modules folder, so I gitignore these suckers. But… this means that my code is NOT ready to use.

One of the thing I really, really like on GitLab is that I can have a build process run everytime I push some code. Why this is helpful? Well, GitLab CI deals with all these issues and I have the package ready to download from this address (this is called an artifact and is the result of the CI build process):

Do you notice the job param? Is the same as the YAML key below!

However, what is the problem? You can’t download this package dirrectly; you must do this either from their UI or via an arcane curl command, that sets a http header:

curl -L --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: XXYYZZ" "" -o ""

You can create a private token on this page. Just create one that only have read_registry scope enabled and set to not expire. Since this token can represent a security issue, please consider creating a dumb user to whom you provide only a read access and add that user to your project (instead of using your token).


image: tetraweb/php:7.1

  - docker-php-ext-enable zip
  - php composer-setup.php
  - php composer.phar install --no-dev -o --prefer-dist # <<< add more tasks below
  - mkdir -p my-plugin-name
  - rsync -av --exclude-from='deploy-exclude-files.txt' . my-plugin-name # <<< this is where you'll have all the files you need to be deployed

my_plugin_name: # <<< this key is important and can be anything
  retry: 2
  cache: # <<< this block is optional, but it will improve build time 
  untracked: true 
  key: ${CI_BUILD_REF_NAME} 
    - node_modules/ 
    - vendor/ 
    name: "${CI_BUILD_NAME}_${CI_BUILD_REF_NAME}" 
    untracked: false 
    paths: - my-plugin-name/ 
  script: - echo 'Deploying!' 

In case you wonder, deploy-exclude-files.txt is a file that contains all files and folder you want to be excluded from your final ZIP file. It has one file/folder name per line and that’s all

Once the build process is done, as long as you are authentificated to gitlab, you will be able to access it on `` url.

Best of both worlds

But a problem arise: how can you specify that build artifact URL in your tgmpa config? Well, that’s easier than you’d expect: just set a header! If you’re digging into TGMPA code, you’ll notice that it uses WP_Http class to download external fiels. This means that… you can set some options!

add_filter('http_request_args', function ($r, $url) { 
  if (preg_match('/\/iamntz/', $url)) { 
    $r['headers']['PRIVATE-TOKEN'] = 'XXYYZZ'; 
  return $r; 
}, 10, 2); 

After that, you modify your tgmpa config to look like this (notice the * before the URL!):

$plugins = [ 
  "simple-taxonomy-ordering" => "",
  "my_plugin_name" => "*"

Yup, is that simple!

However, you may want to pay some attention to the preg_match('/\/iamntz/', $url) pattern and be as specific as you can (e.g. it may conflicts with GitLab’s releases feature). Just play around a little. 😉

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Ionuț Staicu


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