Parker Jones wrote:
Hello,
I have to move my wiki installation several times a year and it's always a laborious, time-consuming admin task. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Moving_a_wiki
I was wondering if there were any plans to make it easier? Would it be possible to develop a script or admin functionality to automate the task - saying breaking it into just two steps: "Export entire wiki" and "Import wiki". It would backup/restore the database, copy any additional files LocalSettings, (uploaded images etc), ...
It's easy to do, but each sysadmin will have different needs and will thus need different scripts.
Supposing the server location and db don't change between servers (eg. it is always on /wiki and localhost database with same user) it could be like this:
backup-wiki.sh mysqldump -u $USER --password=$PASSWORD $DATABASE -c > backup.sql || exit 1 bzip2 backup.sql || exit 1
tar cjf backup.tbz backup.sql.bz2 LocalSettings.php images/ math/ || exit 1
# Alternatively, tar the whole mediawiki folder
unbackup-wiki.sh # Unpack the backup on the latest mediawiki MW_VER=1.15.3 wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/%60echo $MW_VER | sed "s/([0-9]*.[0-9]*).*/\1/"`/mediawiki-$MW_VER.tar.gz -O mediawiki.tgz || exit 1 tar xzf mediawiki.tgz || exit 1 cd mediawiki-* && mv * .. && cd .. && rmdir mediawiki-* || exit 1 tar xjf backup.tbz || exit 1 php5 maintenance/update.php || exit 1
Another problem I encounter is that one platform has an older version of mediawiki and the new platform has a newer version - but to move the wiki there's no way around installing two versions on one of the servers. Am I missing something?
Moving to an older wiki is not supported. You could install two mediawiki versions side by side, each with its own database but what you neeed is to update if you are moving to a server with an *older* mediawiki (moving to a newer mediawiki is not a problem, just run update.php, see the above sample)