Upgrading MediaWiki

This method is discouraged. Use the latest tarball instead unless good reason to run the live code tree

Objective: Get the freshest MediaWiki installed on http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/ using git where ever possible.

Instructions followed: The official upgrading MediaWiki guide

Thanks go to: Naturally the MediaWiki devels and documenters. Special thanks to SPF|Cloud @ freenode irc for kind help in figuring out the problems encountered

MediaWiki - Because ideas want to be free.
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I upgraded from 1.25.6 to 1.28 alpha which is the in-development version. My experience with MediaWiki is that the people responsible for the tech know what they are doing. Prestige software attracts prestige devels so I decided to go with the development version.

First off: Backup the files and the database. Something could go wrong even if usually MediaWiki upgrade procedures are rock-solid.

Then get the latest MediaWiki from git with

git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/mediawiki/core.git

Next get all the skins by removing the skins directory and then issuing in the MediaWiki core directory

git clone --recursive https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins skins

Change into the extensions directory and update the extensions with

git pull

Put the images/ and the extensions/ directory into a .tar.gz and move it over to the ../core/ directory and uncompress there

Get the vendor libraries used by WMF clusters

git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/mediawiki/vendor.git

Now you are ready to do the upgrade. I shut the Apache2 down for the duration of that just to feel more secure that the update.php will work but I don’t think this is required for safety. Change to the maintenance/-directory in core/ and

php5 update.php

move the old w/-directory out of the way and move core/ into w/ and access the Special:Version of your wiki in browser and you should see that it is up and running with the latest software version.

And keep up-to-date

  • ‘git pull’
  • ‘git pull –recurse-submodules’ in skins/ and extension/
  • Got some complains about composer being out-of-date. Fix with ‘sudo composer self-update’ and ‘composer update’
  • ‘php maintenance/update.php’