3.9.5. Upgrading with a Tarball

If you are unable (or unwilling) to use Git, another option is to obtain a tarball of the latest version from our website and upgrade your Bugzilla installation using that.

Without a source code management system to help you, the process may be trickier.

3.9.5.1. Before You Upgrade

Before you start your upgrade, there are a few important steps to take:

1. Read the Release Notes of the version you're upgrading to and all intermediate versions, particularly the "Notes for Upgraders" sections, if present. They may make you aware of additional considerations.
2. Run the Sanity Check on your installation. Attempt to fix all warnings that the page produces before you start, or it's possible that you may experience problems during your upgrade.
3. Work out how to back up your Bugzilla entirely, and how to restore from a backup if need be.

Customized Bugzilla?

If you have modified the code or templates of your Bugzilla, then upgrading requires a bit more thought and effort than the simple process below. See Choosing a Customization Method for a discussion of the various methods of code customization that may have been used.

The larger the jump you are trying to make, the more difficult it is going to be to upgrade if you have made local code customizations. Upgrading from 4.2 to 4.2.1 should be fairly painless even if you are heavily customized, but going from 2.18 to 4.2 is going to mean a fair bit of work re-writing your local changes to use the new files, logic, templates, etc. If you have done no local changes at all, however, then upgrading should be approximately the same amount of work regardless of how long it has been since your version was released.

If you have made customizations, you should do the upgrade on a test system with the same configuration and make sure all your customizations still work. If not, port and test them so you have them ready to reapply once you do the upgrade for real.

As you are using a tarball and not an SCM, it's not at all easy to see if you've made local code customizations. You may have to use institutional knowledge, or download a fresh copy of your current version of Bugzilla and compare the two directories. If you find that you have, you'll need to turn them into a patch file, perhaps by diffing the two directories, and then reapply that patch file later. If you are customizing Bugzilla locally, please consider rebasing your install on top of git.

3.9.5.2. Getting The New Bugzilla

Download a copy of the latest version of Bugzilla from the Download Page into a separate directory (which we will call bugzilla-new) alongside your existing Bugzilla installation (which we will assume is in a directory called bugzilla).

3.9.5.3. Copy Across Data and Modules

Copy the contents of the following directories from your current installation of Bugzilla into the corresponding directory in bugzilla-new/:

lib/
data/
template/en/custom (may or may not exist)

You also need to copy any extensions you have written or installed, which are in the extensions/ directory. Bugzilla ships with some extensions, so again if you want to know if any of the installed extensions are yours, you may have to compare with a clean copy of your current version. You can disregard any which have a disabled file - those are not enabled.

Lastly, copy the following file from your current installation of Bugzilla into the corresponding place in bugzilla-new/:

localconfig

This file contains your database password and access details.

3.9.5.4. Swap The New Version In

Now we swap the directories over. From the directory containing the bugzilla and bugzilla-new directories, run:

mv bugzilla bugzilla-old

mv bugzilla-new bugzilla

cd bugzilla

3.9.5.5. Upgrading the Database

Run checksetup.pl. This will do everything required to convert your existing database and settings to the new version.

cd $BUGZILLA_HOME

./checksetup.pl

Warning

For some upgrades, running checksetup.pl on a large installation (75,000 or more bugs) can take a long time, possibly several hours, if e.g. indexes need to be rebuilt. If this length of downtime would be a problem for you, you can determine timings for your particular situation by doing a test upgrade on a development server with the production data.

checksetup.pl may also tell you that you need some additional Perl modules, or newer versions of the ones you have. You will need to install these, either system-wide or using the install-module.pl script that checksetup.pl recommends.

3.9.5.6. Finishing The Upgrade

1. Reactivate Bugzilla by clear the text that you put into the shutdownhtml parameter.
2. Run another Sanity Check on your upgraded Bugzilla. It is recommended that you fix any problems you see immediately. Failure to do this may mean that Bugzilla may not work entirely correctly.

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This documentation undoubtedly has bugs; if you find some, please file them here.