How-to: Verify WordPress Theme checksums

In order to compare our checksums versus your files, you’ll need to have SSH access to your WordPress files.

Once logged in via SSH, use the cd utility to nativate to the documentroot of your WordPress site. This is usually somewhere like /home/user/www , or /var/www/html, although this can vary. Check with your web host if you’re not sure where this is.

 cd /path/to/wordpress

From there, you should navigate to your theme directory, which is usually wp-content/themes/.

cd wp-content/themes

Now, you’ll need to know the slug of your theme(s), which will usually be the directory name that they’re contain in:

ls -l

Alternatively, if wp-cli is installed, you can switch to the user that own the files and just get all the information you need quickly:

wp theme list --fields=name,version

As another alternative, you can always get the theme name and version from within wp-admin under Appearance > Themes > Theme Details.

Once you know the theme , move into that theme’s directory:

cd theme-name/

You’ll need to get the checksums for the version of the theme you have installed. So for example, to get the md5sums of the files for version 2.5.3 of the storefront theme, you would access them at the following location: https://wpmd5.mattjung.net/theme/storefront/2.5.3/.

Now finally, to pull it all together, use curl to retrieve our md5sum list, and the md5sum command to compare our checksums against the checksums of your theme files:

curl -s https://wpmd5.mattjung.net/theme/storefront/2.5.3/ |md5sum -c --quiet -

If the command returns no output, that means all of your files matched up exactly against the known checksums, which is good. If there is output, that usually means there was at least one file that didn’t match, which should be looked into if the file wasn’t intentionally edited.