Upgrading Mediawiki from 1.6.5 to 1.9.2

I have been running Mediawiki 1.6.5 on a Gentoo server for quite some time. Today I decided that I would perform the upgrade to 1.9.2 -- which has been installed for a while without being configured for use.

The first step that I took was to update my httpd.conf to point to the new wiki location:

#Alias /mediawiki "/usr/share/webapps/mediawiki/1.6.5/htdocs"
Alias /mediawiki "/usr/share/webapps/mediawiki/1.9.2/htdocs"

The next step was to test it out. If I had a large user base or any outside users, I would have enabled the second one without disabling the first and locked my database. I dont have any users other than myself, so I did not worry about this step.

I navigated to the URL of my installation and I received an error about the config directory not being writable. I realized here that I needed to copy by LocalSettings.php from the old installation to the new version.

cp /usr/share/webapps/mediawiki/1.6.5/htdocs/LocalSettings.php /usr/share/webapps/mediawiki/1.9.2/htdocs

After copying the settings file, I visited the URL again and this time I was able to see the content. Now on to the testing phase.

To test my new wiki version, I first navigated around to make sure I could see all of the content -- this worked flawlessly. The next test was to add some content.

After adding some content, I received an internal error that suggested that I add the following line to my LocalSettings.php:

$wgShowExceptionDetails = true;

I added the above line to the end of my LocalSettings.php and I was rewarded with the error message below:

Utf8Case.ser is missing, please run "make" in the serialized directory

Backtrace:

#0 /var/www/fuag.com/htdocs/mediawiki/languages/Language.php(972): Language::getCaseMaps()
#1 /var/www/fuag.com/htdocs/mediawiki/includes/SearchUpdate.php(51): Language->stripForSearch('This will be an...')
#2 /var/www/fuag.com/htdocs/mediawiki/includes/Wiki.php(295): SearchUpdate->doUpdate()
#3 /var/www/fuag.com/htdocs/mediawiki/includes/Wiki.php(277): MediaWiki->doUpdates(Array)
#4 /var/www/fuag.com/htdocs/mediawiki/index.php(49): MediaWiki->finalCleanup(Array, Object(LoadBalancer), Object(OutputPage))
#5 {main}

This was not very clear to me, as there was not serialize directory in my installation. I did some looking around and came up with the following fix, specific to Gentoo:

1. Download new mediawiki from: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.9/mediawiki-1.9.3.tar.gz

curl -C - -O 'http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.9/mediawiki-1.9.3.tar.gz'

2. Un-tar in /tmp and copy the serialized directory from the downloaded version to my local copy:

tar xzf mediawiki-1.9.3.tar.gz

cp -a serialized/ /usr/share/webapps/mediawiki/1.9.2/htdocs/

3. Run make in the new directory

make

4. Change permissions on the new directory to match the rest of my stuff in htdocs:

chown -R root:web_devs serialized/

5. Restart apache and it should now work!

Don't forget to comment out the added line in LocalSettings.php so that any end-users don't see your specific error messages.

Now I can remove all of the in-between versions that I have not been using.

primary mediawiki # ll
total 32
drwxrwsr-x 6 root web_devs 4096 Mar  4 15:14 1.6.5
drwxr-xr-x 7 root web_devs 4096 May 23  2006 1.6.6
drwxr-xr-x 7 root web_devs 4096 Jun  8  2006 1.6.7
drwxr-xr-x 7 root web_devs 4096 Sep  3 09:13 1.6.8
drwxr-xr-x 7 root web_devs 4096 Nov 28 23:45 1.7.1
drwxr-xr-x 7 root web_devs 4096 Jan 13 21:15 1.8.2
drwxr-xr-x 7 root web_devs 4096 Jan 19 22:10 1.9.0
drwxr-xr-x 6 root web_devs 4096 Mar  4 16:07 1.9.2
primary mediawiki #