I run my family’s genealogy website.

The website uses an open source software named webtrees.

The software is wonderful and is highly recommended.

Every so often there’s an update. For whatever reason, automatic updating does not work for me.

Instead, I’m forced to do the update manually.

MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS BACKED BEFORE DOING ANY UPDATES.

I use cron to automatically backup the webtrees database every day.

I also use rsync to download the backup databases and data.

I also have AWS backup the actual server everyday.

I’ve had things break. You’ll be miserable if you do not backup everything before an update.

This is how webtrees recommends manually upgrading.

This is how I do it.

  1. BACKUP EVERYTHING. You shouldn’t have to be told this, but a backup strategy is the first thing you should setup when running a website.

  2. Make your webtrees unavailable by going to your webtrees data directory and creating a empty file named offline.txt.

    cd /var/www/html/webtrees/data - changes into directory

    sudo touch offline.txt - creates empty file

  3. Download the webtrees updated zip file from webtrees.

  4. Upload the zip file to the server with filezilla (an open source ftp client).

  5. Copy the zipped file to the same level where webtrees is stored. So, if webtrees is at /var/www/html/webtrees, copy the zipped webtrees-2.x.x.zip to /var/www/html.

    sudo cp webtrees-2.x.x.zip /var/www/html - copies file to directory

  6. cd /var/www/html - changes into directory.

  7. sudo unzip webtrees-2.x.x.zip

  8. Choose Overwrite All. This will overwrite the old files without removing your data files and any modules you’ve created).

  9. sudo rm webtrees-2.x.x.zip

  10. cd webtrees/data

  11. sudo rm offline.txt

Done.

MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS BACKED BEFORE DOING ANY UPDATES.

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