Thread:Extension talk:LiquidThreads/Hosted Server Issues/reply (2)

I was able to do this by making a partial clone of the MW deployment on my desktop machine -- with LocalSettings.php configured to use the same database as the real site. You only need PHP and the MySQL client, not Apache or the MySQL server. In theory this should work just as well as running scripts on the actual server, as long as they are only doing DB operations.

The subfolders I needed in order for the update scripts to work:
 * extensions
 * includes
 * languages
 * maintenance

This only works if your hosting account lets you connect to MySQL from outside, but many of them do. If that's not an option, you could clone the data locally, run the scripts, and then update the site from the local data.

Hope this is helpful.