Upgrading software

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MediaWiki

I just finished upgrading the software that runs this site, and boy was it simple. Since there are no database schema changes in minor versions for mediawiki, I didn't have to use the installer at all. Instead, it was a simple matter of uncompressing the 'archive' of files over the current installation.

Always make backups

First, I made a database backup, and a filesystem backup, just in case things went haywire. To create the db backup, I used my ISP's installation of phpMyAdmin which makes it really convenient and simple to create a backup of a MySQL database. Then for the filesystem, I used rsync from my linux command shell to move a copy of the site to my local server. The local server already had all the files, so this was merely a check to see what was newer on the production server compared with my local server.

The upgrade

Once the backups were in place, I just downloaded the new software, uncompressed it, and copied over the existing software:

cd <web root>
wget http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.3.8.tar.gz
tar -xzvf mediawiki-1.3.8.tar.gz
cp -R mediawiki-1.3.8/* nbpt-gnus/

It was really that simple. Thanks Brion, and all the developers of Mediawiki, plus the live support at #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net