28 December 2017, 19:24

Dear Experts

We have a Mahara Installation running at kn.rota.org 

The version is too old now 15.10.2 

I want to upgrade it to the latest 17.10 version 

Unlike Wordpress where there is single click update, there is no update option in Mahara.  

What are the best practices to update the server - STEP by STEP ? 

The current dedicated hosting server is NOT on a cloud like AWS where i can create copies of instances easily to play around. 

So I will have to be careful with a new copy without touching the actual running server. 

It will be too risky to change things on the currently running system since it has a big community of users and if anything goes wrong, i will lose my job :( 

I am also concerned about the theme compatibility since there might be too many differences between 15 and 17 versions of Mahara. 

Thank You for your advice. 

Waqas 

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29 December 2017, 7:55

Hello Waqas,

You can find information on upgrading your Mahara site on the wiki. You should be following the steps on a test server though first to ensure that the upgrade is going to run through without any problems.

To set up your test instance (ideally on a server that runs the same operating system version, version of PHP and database), you'd set up the codebase and then put the database and site files into place. Information on the database commands (for Postgres) is available in the developer environment setup on the wiki.

You should be able to upgrade from 15.10 to 17.10 in one step as we support direct upgrades from that version. However, if you run into database issues due to bad data, you may want to try smaller upgrade steps.

The themes did indeed change between 15.10 and 17.10. If you have a custom theme, you would need to re-do it. For the initial test upgrade, you can revert to one of the built-in themes. When developing your own theme, you can base it on any of the themes that come with Mahara as parent theme and then make the necessary adjustments to your own theme.

Cheers

Kristina