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Note: if you installed DokuWiki through your Linux Distribution's package manager (eg. using a Debian or Fedora package) or similar tools you should also use this tool to upgrade your DokuWiki. Descriptions on this page are meant for standard, manual installations as described on the install page only.
DokuWiki is very simple to upgrade. Its file layout is organized in a way that avoids overwriting any user content, which means an upgrade generally is just unpacking a new version on top of an old one. You should first try the simple instructions given here, if you encounter problems or the instructions are not detailed enough for you, read the details in the section below. Mac users should use Terminal : copy files via Finder will delete all data.
tar zcpfv dokuwiki-backup.tar.gz /path/to/dokuwiki
cd ~ wget http://.../dokuwiki-xxxx-xx-xx.tgz
tar zxvf dokuwiki-xxxx-xx-xx.tgz 'cp' -af dokuwiki-xxxx-xx-xx/* /path/to/dokuwiki/
The quotes on cp assure that it will run as is, even if an alias is set.
Note: Yes, we explicitly recommend overwriting your old installation. If you adhered to the advice of defining config options in *.local files only (the Configuration Manager does this automatically) your previous config settings will not be overwritten. The same is true for all your pages and media files. Using the overwrite approach will save you a lot of trouble with keeping page revisions correctly working as these are depending on file modification time-stamps.
Dokuwiki version since 2015-08-10 “Detritus” requires some special settings in suhosin php extension (if installed), otherwise edit page and plugin update/install won't work. Please refer to DokuWiki Installation for detailed instruction.
The following pages should give you hints on common post-upgrade problems:
If you get errors about missing/non-writable directories, you probably didn't read the changelog carefully enough. When upgrading to Angua you need to create two new directories and make them writable:
data/media_attic
data/media_meta
Here are a few different upgrade descriptions, provided by users. They might be slightly out of date.
When upgrading from a distribution which is a few or more years old, it is best to upgrade in stages, one year at a time, using the steps described above. You can get old distributions from the download archive.