Back in August, I had tried and failed to upgrade the Flashlight Wiki’s software from MediaWiki 1.16 to 1.17. For whatever reason, I thought it would be a good time to try again. Only now they are up to version 1.18.
So I downloaded the new software and then uploaded it to my server. I put the compressed file in a new folder, but really it unzips into its own folder, so that isn’t necessary. I renamed the folder flashlightwiki instead of flashlightwiki where the original is. I also did a backup of the database and all the files in the original installation. I left the zip archive of files in place with restricted permissions in case I need to recover quickly. Last time I had to re-upload the zip file to recover.
This is where it gets tricky. I guess the way to do it is to go ahead and run the installer and generate a localsettings.php file. So I tried that out and it worked okay I guess except the wiki itself did not work exactly right when I was done. So instead I pulled up a copy of the new localsettings and the old one and did a line by line comparison to make all the same changes to the new one that I had made to the old one, while leaving any new stuff in place. Then I dragged over the images and extensions folders to the new installation.
And I got an error. I think it was something in my meta tags extension that wasn’t working. So I disabled that extension by editing localsettings. And it worked! Sort of. There were still some problems that I spent all afternoon tracking down and fixing. It would probably help to just print a copy of the old localsettings to use as a go-by. At some point I renamed the old folder and named the new folder flashlightwiki to make it the official copy. I also needed to move the .htaccess folder at this point.
There were some customizations I had done to the stylesheet of the old installation which I had made by modifying the css file in Monobook called main.css (which you aren’t supposed to do). I was able to eventually get these customizations to work using wiki pages instead, described at the end of this blog post of customizations.
I also tried to make my localsettings.php file a little more organized. Before I had my customizations all over the place. I would include a comment so I would know what I did, but really I don’t think the order matters so much and it is better to do all the new stuff at the bottom. But some stuff involves user preferences or disabling something in the top section. Moving my stuff to the bottom might also make upgrading easier. There is supposed to be some automatic upgrade tool, but I wasn’t able to figure that out.
The software was upgraded in November, so hopefully they won’t change it for a little while.
Really, I think the process should be easy:
- Unzip the software to a different folder
- Run the installer there and generate a localsettings.php file
- Make a backup of this localsettings file
- Create a hybrid localsettings that takes code from the old and the new files (this is the hardest part)
- Move the hybrid localsettings, images, extensions, and .htaccess files to the new folder.
- Rename the old folder to something else. Rename the new folder.
Tweak the CSS if there is a new skin involved.
Three days after I originally wrote this, they released 1.18.1. I don’t think I’ll bother, but the minor releases are supposed to be easier to install.
It was a rainy Saturday, so I decided to give the upgrade a shot and see if I’ve gotten better at the process. So I downloaded the file, uploaded it to my server, and unzipped the files. I ran in the configuration script and then tried making a copy of .htaccess and localsettings.php along with the folders images and extensions. I couldn’t figure out a way to do this in Filezilla, so I copied those files to my local hard drive which took a while. Then I was uploading them back and it was taking even longer. So I aborted that.
Next I just tried the easy way. I deleted the previous installation and unzipped it again. This time I renamed the original extensions and images folders and then just dragged the good ones into place (this would keep the files from getting all jumbled up too) along with htaccess and localsettings. Then I renamed the old folder to something else and the new install folder to flashlightwiki. Worked perfectly and it was really easy.
Upgraded to 1.18.2 today. It was a little more complicated than last time because I had installed the wptouch skin for mobile users, so I had to move that over along with the extensions, images, localsettings, and htaccess. It didn’t work right at first, but I realized I had forgotten htaccess. Also they made the extension ConfirmEdit part of the default installation, so I wanted to use it instead of bringing over my own copy, but Asirra isn’t part of ConfirmEdit yet (supposed to be soon) so I had to put the Asirra files in the ConfirmEdit folder. Version 1.19 is in beta, so there will be another upgrade soon.
Today I upgraded to 1.18.3. Probably the reason I forgot to move the htaccess file last time was that it doesn’t show up in the file manager in cPanel. So I FTP’d it to my computer and then back to the new installation.
Asirra is packaged with ConfirmEdit now, but ConfirmEdit gave me some kind of bug when I logged off, so I wound up moving my old copy of captcha.php to the new installation (the offending function seemed to be getIP).
Just a couple of days after 1.18.3 came out, they release 1.19.0. So I went ahead and installed it last night. It went pretty smoothly. Because this version modifies the database, I had to go through the whole setup process. My localsettings.php file is in pretty good shape with most of the automatically generated stuff at the top and my customizations at the bottom. Asirra ran fine as a part of ConfirmEdit (which is part of the default installation), so I didn’t have to do anything with that. The good thing about doing the updates frequently is I’m getting pretty good at the procedure. The bad thing is it is time-consuming and risky. But even when I had gotten my draft copy of 1.19.0 ready and the database was converted, the existing site was still working fine in place. Then when I got the skins, extensions, and images moved over, everything seemed to work fine when I made the final change to go live with the new software.