WebGUI
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Upgrading WebGUI

Upgrading WebGUI is relatively simple. It is simply a matter of copying some files and running the upgrade scripts for the database.

Upgrade History

If you want to see what patches have been applied to your WebGUI install, the upgrade utility can tell you that. Simply run this command:

cd /data/WebGUI/sbin
perl upgrade.pl --history --doit

How Upgrades Work

Upgrades in WebGUI work by applying incremental patches to your existing WebGUI site. You first start by copying the new WebGUI distribution over the top of your existing one.

NOTE: This will overwrite any files you've customized including preload.perl.

Then you start appling the data patches using the methods described below. This applies each patch to each of your WebGUI site's data since your last upgrade to make your data compliant with the new version of the code.  So if you're upgrading from 5.0.2 to 6.0.3 there might be several dozen patches applied to your site's data. It then repeats this process for every site you have configured. If you have a lot of sites, or you don't upgrade very often, the upgrade process can take a long time. So be prepared for down time.

Preparing for the Upgrade

The first thing to do is to find out if a new version of WebGUI is available. You can do this quickly and easily three different ways:

  1. From your web site go to Admin Console > Statistics and it will tell you what version you are running, and what the latest version is.
  2. From your server command line run the following command to find out your local version and the latest:
    cd /data/WebGUI/sbin
    perl testEnvironment.pl
  3. Visit getwebgui.com, which always has the latest version.

 

Backups

Before you ever perform an upgrade, always run a complete backup of your environment. Usually upgrades will go smoothly, but if it doesn't, you're going to want a full backup so you can restore anything and everything.

Upgrade Options

After you've found out if there is an upgrade, and have decided to upgrade, there are two ways to do it. First, if you're using the WRE you can use WebGUI Update, which is an automated upgrade system. If you did a source install, you can do a manual upgrade.

WRE WebGUI Update (Automatic)

To use WebGUI Update go to the command line, and then do the following:

  1. Stop Spectre

    /data/wre/sbin/wreservice.pl --stop spectre
  2. Run WebGUI Update and follow the onscreen instructions.

    /data/wre/sbin/webguiupdate.pl
  3. Restart Apache

    /data/wre/sbin/wreservice.pl --restart web
  4. Start Spectre

    /data/wre/sbin/wreservice.pl --start spectre
  

 

Manual Upgrade

To perform a manual upgrade, run the following steps:

  1. Download the new version of WebGUI.
  2. Decompress the new version of WebGUI.
  3. Read the WebGUI/docs/gotcha.txt file to see what you should know about before upgrading. Follow any instructions in there.
  4. Read the WebGUI/docs/changelog/7.x.x.txt file to see what has changed since your current version.
  5. Stop Spectre.

    cd /data/WebGUI/sbin
    perl spectre.pl --shutdown
  6. Decompress the new version of WebGUI over the top of the old version of WebGUI
     
    cd /data
    tar xvfz /path/to/webgui-x.x.x-stable.tar.gz
  7. Restart Apache
  8. Run the upgrade

    cd /data/WebGUI/sbin
    perl upgrade.pl
  9. Note that the above command won't work directly. You need to read the output of the upgrade script to find out how to make it work. This is our way of ensuring that you're not blindly following instructions without knowing what you're getting into.
  10. Restart Apache again just for good measure.
  11. Start Spectre

    cd /data/WebGUI/sbin
    perl spectre.pl --daemon
  12. Run testEnvironment.pl

    cd /data/WebGUI/sbin
    perl testEnvironment.pl
  13. Test your site(s) to make sure everything is working.

Keywords: upgrade