Just recently I read a really interesting blog post found in the Weekly Drop Newsletter called “Say No to Auto-Updates: Why Your Website Deserves Better Than Subscription Overhaul”. I appreciate articles that take a strong stance, and this one certainly does. However, I strongly disagree with its conclusions.

First, to get that out of the way. I actually do agree with two things 

• Updates should be tested (manually, automatically or both)
• An experienced developer carefully running the correct composer commands is always better than a bad automation

But that's where my agreement ends. Many of the points in the article are in what I would call the “general skepticism category”. This is fine, and at this point quite expected. While skepticism is healthy, data and real-world experience tell a different story. So instead of speculating (and me making counter arguments to the article), let’s look at some numbers shall we? I have some numbers. It’s these specific numbers: 3, 8, 58, 9768.

3: My personal and professional experience is with 3 services: Violinist.io, Renovate and Dependabot. For Drupal (and PHP / Composer) updates mentioned in the article I use violinist.io.  

8: I have been automating Drupal updates for 8 years.

58: Currently (at the time of writing) I have 58 personal and professional projects running Drupal (Composer) updates automatically. Most of these are automatically merged after passing tests.

9768: Over the last 8 years exactly 9768 commits have been added by an automatic updater to the 58 projects. 

Personally, I think the numbers speak for themselves. But let’s put it in perspective- try converting 9,768 commits into billable hours. Imagine the sheer amount of repetitive work automated away. You can speculate all you want - whether automation fails half the time (spoiler: it doesn’t) or if it’s actually a massive time-saver (it is). But at the end of the day, the results are undeniable.

So, while some debate the risks, I’ll be over here letting automation do what it does best - saving time and getting things done. Here is an animated gif from the days from long before all of these fancy package managers and automation tools.