Moving the Wiki

I haven’t done much with the Flashlight Wiki lately, but a couple of other users have made some changes, which is a good sign maybe. My long time web host A Small Orange, which was a local company at one time, has changed hands a couple of times and has finally gone up on their price from $50 per year to $86. That is more than I want to pay, so I looked around for better options and found HostGator which you could get a really good introductory deal on by committing to 3 years of service for only $3.95 per month for their baby plan, which is pretty much unlimited shared hosting. Then before I could make up my mind, the website offered a better rate of $3.48 per month, so I took it.

Then I had to move everything over. Most of the igirder website is just static web pages, so it was just a matter of zipping all of the files on the website and moving them over to the new place and extracting them. After that I had to reset the DNS servers for igirder.com to HostGator’s servers and then wait for the rest of the internet to catch up. Worked great.

More challenging, I knew, would be moving the Flashlight Wiki since it involves databases and is always touchy anyway. At A Small Orange my database was named igirder_flashlightwiki, but at HostGator it would be named cashin_flashlightwiki. I figured I would practice on a very small older wiki I wrote for CAD software (seriously small, maybe 10 pages at most). It is pretty easy to export a SQL database from the old host and then you can import it at the new host. The little wiki was my first try and I wasn’t sure that I had ever upgraded it to a newer version of MediaWiki (though now I am pretty sure I did), but even if I had it would be about 3 years out of date when I stopped updating the wiki software due to problems with the installation. So I started fresh with a new MediaWiki install for the small wiki since I did virtually no customizations to that install, unlike the Flashlight Wiki which has a ton of customizations. I ran into trouble pretty quickly as the MediaWiki software couldn’t get access to the database. It turns out that I had imported everything fine and had set up a database administrator, I hadn’t put that administrator in charge of that database. Ugh. So I went ahead and did that and it worked okay, but I was getting missing page errors, so I changed the installation to “pretty small URLs” and still had trouble. I put the files in a subdirectory and still had some trouble until I fixed the htaccess file to point to that subdirectory, on top of some other commands that made the pretty small URLs work. Then I got it working, but when I tried to log in, I would get an error. I’m not really updating that page, so I left well enough alone. What I did learn was don’t try to change anything. Just bring the files and database over instead of trying to do anything at all different other than the new database name and administrator. My mistake was trying to do a new version install and changing the URL format.

So for the Flashlight Wiki, I wanted to do the simple move. The problem is with the htaccess referring to flashlightwiki.com which kind of prevents me from doing a test directory, so I took a leap and reset the DNS servers from ASO to HostGator. I made a small change in the localsettings file so that I could tell if I was getting the wiki from the old server or the new server and I wasn’t seeing the update, even after an hour of waiting. I tried to pull the site up on my phone and was getting an error, just an empty directory. The problem was I didn’t set the full path for DNS correctly, so it was pointing to my root directory instead of in my public_html directory. That was an easy fix and then it was working, amazingly.

The next thing I wanted to do was update the installation to v1.30 from v1.23 that I had installed a few years ago. I found out that the way to install a skin had changed slightly, so WPtouch wasn’t working right with the new version (which is why I never finished installing it years ago). But that skin also hadn’t been updated recently, so rather than mess with I decided to leave it disabled for a while until I could get the new software up to date, then install MinervaNeue, a more modern mobile skin that Wikipedia uses for mobile browsing.

In the meantime, I was still having some issues with the new install. One key part of the upgrade is updating the database structure to work with the new software. If you do a fresh install, the installer updates the database for you. However, I found out that you can also run an update instead without running through the entire new installation questionnaire. That lets you keep your localsettings.php file except that some of the things in localsettings may not work right with the new software. In my case I think I forgot one of the extensions or it wasn’t working anymore, so I either loaded it or got rid of it. Part of the problem was the installer script that you run through asks what my Wiki admin username and password were, but balked because the password was less than eight letters. So I had to revert to the old functioning wiki to change my password before I could make that work. Even when I got the install working, just like with the small wiki, I couldn’t log in. I found out this was because the database had not actually updated, so I did the shortcut I just talked about to update it and it worked. I just had to enter a secret word from localsettings in the form for it to do the upgrade. Then I could add in the new skin and the extension I needed to run that (pretty easy, just installed one extension, one skin, and added some lines to localsettings). So now it is on the new server, the software is up to date, and it is all working. Tomorrow I can go ahead and tell A Small Orange to cancel my account. I only had a week to go.