Difference between revisions of "WikiDB/Upgrading"

Revision as of 13:39, 6 July 2011

This page explains how to upgrade WikiDB, along with any WikiDB-specific considerations when upgrading MediaWiki itself.

Upgrading MediaWiki

In theory, you should not need to perform any additional steps when upgrading MediaWiki, in relation to WikiDB.

In practice, there is always the possibility that a new version of MW will cause problems for existing extensions. These largely fall into three categories, which are as follows:

The wiki doesn't work at all after the upgrade

This could happen for a million reasons, so you will need to do some trouble-shooting. These instructions apply to all extensions, not just WikiDB.

1. First, disable all extensions by commenting out the include() lines in LocalSettings.php. Check that MediaWiki itself is working properly when no extensions are installed - it may be that the bug/incompatibility is in MediaWiki itself.
2. Enable your extensions one-by-one and re-test. This should help you to pinpoint the extension that is causing the problem.
3. Upgrade the offending extension. The problem may be fixed in a more recent version.
4. If the problem still exists in the latest version of the extension then you have two choices:
   1. Downgrade MediaWiki to the previous version, and wait for the extension to be made compatible.
   2. Run MediaWiki with that extension disabled.

In either case you should contact the extension author to let them know about the problem, and encourage them to fix it.

The wiki works, but has error messages or unexpected functionality

In general, the same rules apply as for the previous item, so follow the above steps. However, in this case you may find that there are ways to work around the problem (or that it is OK to ignore from the time-being) which mean you are able to continue using the upgraded version without having to disable the extension.

The wiki works fine, however you get unexpected output (odd or missing data, unexpected formatting, etc.)

This may occur for one of two reasons - either the way MW renders something has changed, or the way that data is parsed has been altered in a way that affects WikiDB.

1. Make sure you have upgraded to the latest version of WikiDB, which may have fixed the issue.
2. Run RebuildWikiDB.php with the --wipefirst argument, to re-parse the entire wiki and re-populate the cached WikiDB data. This can be very slow for large wikis, but it will ensure that all data is completely up-to-date.
3. If you are still experiencing problems, please contact me and I will look into it for you.

Upgrading WikiDB

Step 1: Download and install the latest code

You can download the latest version of WikiDB as a zipped archive.

Download WikiDB Here!
or visit the file description page for a bit more information (e.g. version details, etc).

You should delete your existing WikiDB code folder, and extract the downloaded file in its place.

Step 2: DB updates

WikiDB is versioned using a version number and a revision, e.g. version 3, r542. If the version number has not changed, then you do not need to make any changes to the database.

If the version number has changed, this indicates that some changes to the DB are required. Check the release notes for the specifics, and see WikiDB/Maintenance scripts for details about running the scripts that it mentions.

If you can't find the release notes, or are completely paranoid, here's the full set of commands you may need to run on an upgrade. In practice some of these may not be required (or may be runnable with different options, which would save time):

$ cd /path/to/mediawiki/extensions/WikiDB/maintenance
$ php SetupTables.php
$ php RebuildWikiDB.php --wipefirst