I did this last year and took notes and made observations. This time I’m upgrading three mediawiki installations:

• http://lex.malcolmgin.com/ – for running, hosting, and remembering Lexicon games.
• http://food.malcolmgin.com/ – for keeping track of household recipes and food experimentation, reviews, and other related things.
• http://pod.malcolmgin.com/ – for keeping and hosting what I envision as a public storehouse of knowledge about producing, creating, and publishing podcasts, collecting the wisdom and experience of anyone who cares to contribute.

Upgrade and metadata:

• lex:
  Mediawiki Version: 1.26.2
  Version page snapshot: 1, 2, 3
  Target upgrade version: 1.29.1
  PHP req: 5.5.9+ (fine)
  mySQL req: 5.0.2 (fine)
  Export Database: Yes (via phpMyAdmin interface to local file)
  Backed up files: Yes (on remote server with cp -R command)
  • Details:
    • Beware tar -zxvf not putting the extracted files where you want. the update tar.gz file has a subfolder prefix. Use –strip-components=1 argument to ensure your extracted files go where you want them to.
    • Remember to restore LocalSettings.php file to home directory.
    • Double-check LocalSettings.php file permissions in local drive so shared host users can’t steal your passwords.
    • Remember to restore images folder to new home directory.
    • Disable 2FA settings for users BEFORE updating 2FA extensions, if any.
    • Beware OATHAuth extension requires running update.php file after install or logins will fail.
    • TEST.
    • If tests pass, clean up after yourself. Maybe take a local copy of the old files from previous installation, but definitely delete them on the remote host.
    • Consider creating tarball for old file backup to local storage. SFTP for individual files is slow and undoubtedly spammy. Impact on bandwidth and speed.
    • Mark as upgraded in Dreamhost goodies panel
• food
  Mediawiki Version: 1.26.2
  Version snapshots: 1, 2, 3, 4
  Target upgrade version: 1.29.1
  PHP req: 5.5.9+ (fine)
  mySQL req: 5.0.2 (fine)
  Export Database: Yes (via phpMyAdmin interface to local file)
  Backed up files: Yes (on remote server with cp -R command)
  • Details:
    • Weird errors upon running php update.php. Had to bypass with ‘php update.php –skip-external-dependencies’.
    • Version now shows proper included libraries, but plain ‘php update.php’ still returns weird include library version mismatch errors.
    • Because the 2015 version of me was apparently a lunatic, I had installed both composer (a configuration management tool) and I’d used it to install the MediaWiki Maps extension. So I had to install composer, update it, and dig out all the commands to do that as well as create a json file to require that it install the Maps extension through it. So that was an interesting digression.
    • It was easy to test, though, since I have this weird megapage I made for a visitor from London at one point about what eats to check out. Either computing is getting easier (for me) to figure out or I’m getting more intrepid. Probably the latter.
    • Things tested out fine, and after using composer properly to update itself and to update/install the Maps extension, the weird behavior I saw with included libraries was also fixed.
• pod
  Mediawiki Version: 1.26.3
  Version snapshots: 1, 2, 3, 4
  Target upgrade version: 1.29.1
  PHP req: 5.5.9+ (fine)
  mySQL req: 5.0.2 (fine)
  Export Database: Yes (via phpMyAdmin interface to local file)
  Backed up files: Yes (on remote server with cp -R command)
  Compressed remote backup files and downloaded with SFTP: Yes
  • Details:
    • No real issues.
    • Having an email sending problem that I’m currently troubleshooting with DreamHost’s help.