Re: How to upgrade old MW Postgres DB backup into much newer MW version?

On Tue, Jan 10, 2023 at 11:50 AM MI <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> We had Mediawiki with PostgreSQL on a Debian 8 server. That machine is
> no longer accessible, but there is a backup of the database.
>
> The old versions were:
> - Postgres v. 9.4
> - Mediawiki v. 1.25 or 1.27 ?
>
> Now we installed Mediawiki and PostgreSQL on a new Debian 11 server. But
> the database schema seems to be quite different so it will not be
> possible to import the backup directly.
>
> Our current versions on Debian 11 are from the "stable" ("bullseye") apt
> repository:
> - Mediawiki  v. 1.35.8
> - Postgresql v. 13.9
>
> Is there a collection of database upgrade scripts somewhere, which I
> could use to upgrade, step by step, our backup DB to the current schema?
> (The import of the SQL backup into Postgres v. 13 works fine. But then
> the schema needs to be adapted to what MW expects)

My non-official answer...

Restore the backup into a VM for testing. Download MW 1.38 and unpack. Then run:

   # Update Mediawiki components
   php -d extension=phar.so composer.phar update --no-dev
   # Update the database
   php /var/www/html/w/maintenance/update.php --quick

If the update script succeeds, then you should be Ok in real life.

If the update fails, then you may need to try incrementally. Proceed
in sequence: 1.27 to 1.28, 1.28 to 1.29, ..., 1.34 to 1.35.

Related to the upgrade process, the steps we perform for our webserver
is located at https://github.com/weidai11/website/blob/master/mediawiki/wiki-upgrade.txt
. We try to follow Mediawiki releases, so we proceeded in sequence
over years of time.

Jeff