Upgrading

Moodle is designed to upgrade cleanly from one version to the next. Please refer to Upgrading to Moodle 1.6, Upgrading to Moodle 1.8 or Upgrading to Moodle 1.9 for particular considerations related to the upgraded version.

Changes that have been made to the original code, such as installing a contributed module (non-standard module) or a site edit of a php file, may not upgrade. This includes modifications to standard themes, that will be overwritten during an upgrade.

For those using cpanel, you can use this tutorial. It is a bit rough around the edges and is a little dated, but you should get the idea.

When upgrading a Moodle installation you should follow these steps:

Check the requirements

Spend some time re-reading the installation documentation and documentation for the new version. Check the system requirements for the target version you want to upgrade-to in Administration > Server > Environment.

Backup important data

Although it is not strictly necessary, it is always a good idea to make a backup of any production system before a major upgrade, just in case you need to revert back to the older version for some reason. In fact, it's a good idea to automate your server to backup your Moodle installation daily, so that you can skip this step.

There are three areas that need backing up:

1. The Moodle software directory itself

Make a separate copy of these files before the upgrade, so that you can retrieve your config.php and any modules you have added like themes, languages etc

2. Your data directory

This is where uploaded content resides (such as course resources and student assignments) so it is very important to have a backup of these files anyway. Sometimes upgrades may move or rename directories within your data directory.

3. Your database

Most Moodle upgrades will alter the database tables, adding or changing fields. Each database has different ways to backup. One way of backing up a MySQL database is to 'dump' it to a single SQL file. The following example shows Unix commands to dump the database called "moodle":

mysqldump -u username -p -C -Q -e -a moodle > moodle-backup-2007-04-01.sql

(The "-a" switch is deprecated and should be replaced by "--create-options")

Substitute your database user account for username. The -p flag will prompt you for the password for the username specified by -u.

If your database host is different from the host you want to execute the backup command (usually the web server), you have to specify it with the -h option to mysqldump:

mysqldump -u username -p -h databasehost -C -Q -e -a moodle > moodle-backup-2007-04-01.sql

You can also use the "Export" feature in Moodle's optional "MySQL Admin" web interface to do the same thing on all platforms. In Moodle v1.9 and greater, this is located in Site Administration -> Server -> Database. This interface can also be downloaded from http://download.moodle.org/modules/integrations.php. It is an integration of PHPMyAdmin for the Moodle administration interface.

SQL dump caveats

Please note that there are a LOT of options possible for mysqldump. Please talk with your Systems Administrator (if you have one) or similar to see if there are site-specific flags you should use for your SQL dump.
- For example, if your local installation is running MySQL 5.2 and you are moving to a system running MySQL 5.0 or 4.1, you really ought to use the "--compat=mysql40" flag. (This is not too uncommon of a situation given the nature of ISP hosting as compared to local user Moodle setups)
This seems obvious, but should be said outright: These instructions only work for dumping from MySQL! Postgresql, Oracle, and other database servers have different tools to dump databases.
Given the example mysql import lines, above, you really should use the --no-create-db flag. If your database locally is named something differently from the migration site, not including this flag could cause problems.

Install the new Moodle software

Using a downloaded archive

@Do not overwrite an old installation unless you know what you are doing ... sometimes old files can cause problems in new installations. The best way is to rename the current Moodle directory to something else, then unpack the new Moodle archive into the old location.

Linux
mv moodle moodle.backup
tar xvzf moodle-1.1.tgz

Next, copy across your config.php, any other plugins such as custom themes, and your .htaccess file if you created one:

cp moodle.backup/config.php moodle
cp -pr moodle.backup/theme/mytheme moodle/theme/mytheme

Don't forget to

sudo chown www-data moodle/config.php

if necessary.

where www-data is whatever user the Apache user is on your system. This is often 'apache' or 'www'. You can find out by doing 'ls -l' in your /var/www/moodle folder (or wherever your moodle site is) and then looking at the owner and group.

so you may see something like

ls -l

...lots of lines...

-rw-r--r-- 1 apache system 784 Jun 28 2007 config.php

...lots more lines...

so the owner is apache and the group is system.

To replicate this on your new system you can do 'chown apache:system config.php'

or to do a whole group do

chown apache:system ./*

and recursively

chown -R apache:system ./*

Using CVS

You can use CVS for updating or upgrading your Moodle. First you need to do a CVS checkout in your (empty) Moodle root directory.

You can use any of our CVS Mirror servers. Just replace SERVER.cvs.moodle.org in the instructions below with the name of the mirror server you chose!.

For Linux servers

To do a CVS checkout of Moodle, you first have to logon to the Moodle CVS server.

 cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@SERVER.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle login
 No password for anonymous, so just hit the Enter button.

Go to the directory where you want the Moodle root to come and type

 cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@SERVER.cvs.moodle.org:/cvsroot/moodle co -r MOODLE_18_STABLE moodle 
 (where MOODLE_18_STABLE is the desired version)

To update, just go into the Moodle root directory and update to the new files:

 cvs update -dP

To update to a new version type in the following and change 18 to whatever newest version upgrade number is

 cvs -Q update -dP -r MOODLE_18_STABLE

Make sure you use the "d" parameter to create new directories if necessary, and the "P" parameter to prune empty directories.

For Windows servers

You can use Tortoise CVS to do the initial checkout and the updates.

If you have been editing Moodle files, watch the messages very closely for possible conflicts. All your customised themes and non-standard plugins will be untouched.

Don't forget to visit the admin page after the CVS update process has completed.

Finishing the upgrade

The last step is to trigger the upgrade processes within Moodle.

To do this just visit the admin page of your installation e.g. http://example.com/moodle/admin

It doesn't matter if you are logged in as admin or not. If you are upgrading from some older versions you would not be able to login before the upgrade anyway.

Moodle will automatically detect the new version and perform all the database or filesystem upgrades that are necessary. If there is anything it can't do itself (very rare) then you will see messages telling you what you need to do.

Assuming all goes well (no error messages) then you can start using your new version of Moodle and enjoy the new features!

Please note that if you are running a large scale of moodle site (e.g. have more tha 10,000+ courses and 40,000+ users), make sure that you do your own performance profiling testing before you upgrade to Moodle 1.8.x, as there are still quite a few outstanding (unresolved) performance issues in 1.8.x for large user base installations.

Verify the upgrade (optional)

If you wish to confirm that the database definitions in the upgraded database match the definitions of a new, clean install (which they should) you might like to look at Verify Database Schema.

Upgrading more than one version

In general, it is recommended to upgrade via each version of Moodle, for example 1.7 -> 1.8 -> 1.9. An exception to this is when upgrading from 1.5 or 1.6, when it is recommended that 1.7 is skipped, in other words upgrade 1.5 -> 1.6 -> 1.8 -> 1.9. (The main reason for this recommendation is that the default roles settings obtained when upgrading to 1.7 are not ideal for 1.8 onwards.)

Documentation