The excluded-plugin setting that Playwright ignored — fixing browser-mode updates and false residual warnings
The symptom In browser-mode maintenance (Playwright, no SSH), plugins marked as "excluded from update checks" were still being updated. After the run, a "plugin updates remaining" WARNING email arrived every time. The excluded plugins were intentionally left behind, but the residual check treated them as unfinished updates and fired a warning — a two-part problem: wrong behavior and a misleading…
Playwright's excluded-plugin setting was unintentionally updating ignored plugins during browser-mode maintenance, despite being explicitly marked to avoid updates. This led to a two-part issue: incorrect behavior and misleading residual warnings. On SSH-capable sites, WP-CLI's --skip-plugins flag already handled ignored plugins correctly, but Playwright's browser_update_remaining_plugins() function lacked any filtering.
The problem persisted in both pure browser-mode updates and residual updates after SSH, even for sites with properly configured excluded plugins. To fix this, two changes were implemented: replacing the select-all approach with per-checkbox evaluation and adjusting the residual check to avoid false warnings. The new _ignored_plugin_slugs() function converts site ignored plugins into a set of lowercase stripped strings for easy comparison.
The _plugin_slug_from_checkbox_value() function extracts the plugin slug from a checkbox value, normalizing it to lowercase. These changes ensure only non-excluded plugins trigger residual warnings, eliminating misleading alerts and improving the maintenance process.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
