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Hi I've been designing, building and maintaining Joomla sites for my clients for two years now and still don't understand how to upgrade I've read the all the docs and it just says to download the patch, unzip and overwrite the old files. I can't understand how this works since for instance if the patch contains a folder with only one file in it and I use that folder to overwrite the old one with lots of files in then all of the files be be gone except the new one. I can't believe that to upgrade I need to manually go deep into every sub folder and replace every single old file individually? Surely that would take hours and be highly prone to human error. Please enlighten me, thanks

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digital solutions for sentient bipeds (including Joomla web design, custom designed Joomla templates...)
www.digiflip.tv

By "one file" do you mean a zip file or the contents of a .tar or .gz file?

If so, I would recommend you download the .zip file of the patch you require, unzip that (open it) then upload the folders within the zip straight into your Joomla root directory/folder. Make a back up of your site first, just in case!

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My sites: http://ilkleygardeners.org.uk Gardeners, http://wharfedalefestival.co.uk Music Festival

The patch contains the directory structure necessary to replace the correct files. All you need to do is upload the unzipped files with your ftp program and overwrite (if asked) the existing files. All the non updated files will remain in the directory. Your configuration.php file will not be touched.

For example, if you upload the administration directory from the patch package, then it will go into each sub directory below the administrator directory automatically and replace only the necessary files in the various sub-directories, so you don't have to go to each sub-directory to replace the files.


Now a bit easier way..

download the desired patch file as a tar.gz file as this is the most compatible with web servers.. Using your ftp program or your domain control panels file manager, upload the tar.gz file to where you have Joomla installed. Using your domains file manager, extract the uploaded tar.gz file. It will overwrite the necessary files in the necessary directories. Doing it this way, there is less chance to miss a file because of an ftp error.

You can also replace all Joomla specific files in your Joomla install by using the full install tar.gz file. If you do this, you have to remove the install directory and install.php after extraction before the site will work. Using the full install this way does not overwrite your configuration.php.

Note: configuration.php is only created when you run the install programs setup which was done with your initial install.

Edit: Added example.

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PhilD -- Unrequested PM's and/or emails may not get a response.
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Thanks Phil, it all make sense now.

I didn't realise that servers handle file overwriting differently from a normal OS. As you know on Mac or PC this upgrade process wouldn't work at all.

Which leads me to my final question: how can it be done locally? I design and build most of my sites locally before uploading them to the server. It would be great to test the upgrade locally before going live.

Many thanks indeed, I'm sure these explanations will assist many people

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digital solutions for sentient bipeds (including Joomla web design, custom designed Joomla templates...)
www.digiflip.tv

erm it's the same on any os too...

create a folder on your desk top and add a test.txt to it then an index.html (they can both be blank or with something in the index.html to confirm this then create a second folder and recreate the original folder but with only a text.txt in it with the word changed in it then cut this folder and paste it on to your desktop you'll see the index.html isn't touched even though it asks if you want to overwrite it.

I patch my local test installs of Joomla all the time. I just download the patch, extract it to a temporary directory and then copy say the administrator directory for example from the patch over the installed Joomla administrator directory. I do it this way because I usually want to look at what files are in the patch because I modified a core file or two. If these modified files are included in the patch file, then I need to modify them first. Anyway, the process just replaces the files contained in the patch, leaving other files as is. Same as it does if I were to upload the patch to the live site, and extract it there. You should be able to extract the patch over the existing local Joomla install without problem.

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PhilD -- Unrequested PM's and/or emails may not get a response.
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thanks for your reply GarfieldLeChat, I appreciate your help.

I did as you suggested (and a little more) but as I expected it didn't work - the old files which where not in the update folder (as they didn't need updating) got removed.

Here is a video to show you what I'm on about: http://www.digiflipconcepts.com/jing/osx-file-overwrite-test.swf

Maybe I'm missing something very simple here?

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digital solutions for sentient bipeds (including Joomla web design, custom designed Joomla templates...)
www.digiflip.tv

Thanks everyone, I think I figured it out eventually as I just tried the same thing using Win XP:

On a Mac if you overwrite a folder it will replace it entirely leaving no trace of the old files

On a PC if you overwrite a folder it will only overwrite files that have been modified and leave everything else untouched.

So if you are upgrading Joomla - use a PC!

- I just tested it out and it is so easy! I'd better go as I have a few sites to upgrade...

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digital solutions for sentient bipeds (including Joomla web design, custom designed Joomla templates...)
www.digiflip.tv

this isn't normal mac behaviour I have both xp and osx (mac and pc) and have never come accross this problem when copying files ... where you using copy or replace to do this?

copy will copy and leave the others alone but replace... well it does what it says on the tin...

good luck with the upgrading....

This is EXACTLY the problem I had with my MAMP server running Joomla 1.0.12. When I "patched" it, I destroyed my site because of how OSX handles directories with the same name. There is no easy way to do this. You'd have to either use rsync, or Apple's FileMerge app, or create an FTP server and log in locally. I simply just dragged the folders to my VMWare Windows screen and did the merge there.

It would be really nice to have this in a FAQ for the poor OSX users out there...

Well said Sparky, it's taken me two years to figure this out and I build websites mostly with Joomla, full time.

Also it's good to know I'm not going insane, Mac and PC file overwriting really is different

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digital solutions for sentient bipeds (including Joomla web design, custom designed Joomla templates...)
www.digiflip.tv

ahh - it's good to be married to a geek. I'm a drag/drop kind of gal who just got a new mac last week. I've developed on a PC for a while, and I was ecstatic to see that there is now a xampp for Mac OS x. I've spent the past 12 hours or so beating my head against a wall trying to figure this issue out until I ran across this discussion.

I thought it would be ridiculous to upload all my files to a server simply to use an ftp to test when I'm simply trying to test on a localhost, and tedious to move everything file by file. So with a little hand holding from my husband, I braved term. Here are the steps I did first:

1. In xampp, make a folder inside /htdocs called /joomla15. Duplicate this folder so if you don't have a clean upgrade, you easily can revert to a copy of a working site.

2. Download your patch file. I renamed this folder 'patch' and also moved it into /htdocs.

3. Since xampp on Mac OS X uses the term, you should already have this open to start and stop xampp. If you don't have term open, you can find it under 'utilities.'

4. type the following in to change your working directory to the patch folder: cd /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/patch

5. when you get to this point, you can type ls to get a listing of the patch folder. This should have php files and folders that reflect what you downloaded.

6. type the following to grab all the folders and files inside of them to move into your /joomla15 folder: cp -r * ../joomla15

7. test localhost by looking at the /localhost/joomla15 to see if your upgrade worked. Everything was slick!

great post dscokween , I'm sure it will also be very helpful to fellow Joomla people.

Personally the 'terminal' scares me a little and I never go near it. I used to use XAMPP when I could only afford a PC, now I use MAMP - http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html.

I'll stick with upgrading Joomla using the Windows operating system running on my Mac via Parallels. I shall refer back here though if I ever go completely windows free...

Very helpful thread! I'm not familiar with PCs at all, and therefore didn't understand the differences between the two OS regarding overwriting. It took me a long time to find this information, as all the upgrading instructions I found were so overly-simplified (just copy the folder and overwrite the files!). I'm not sure how to FTP to my localhost to install the patch with that method, but I'll give that a try. I might also try FileMerge to do it on localhost without FTP.... I read that might work. Info on FileMerge here, although it's on a drupal site....

http://drupal.org/node/85184

Hi Zackn2, glad this post helped. Thanks for the info on 'FileMerge'. Maybe now I won't have to use Windows! Yes looks like the Drupal documentation is far more comprehensive and useful for this topic. I'll suggest a modification to the Joomla docs crew for us Mac users

I did finally get FileMerge to work, and my site is up and running with the 1.5.9 upgrade. FileMerge wasn't totally intuitive for me, so here's a rundown of what I did in case it helps anyone else. I'm very new at this, so I apologize in advance if I'm doing anything incorrectly... but it seems to have worked in my case.

After downloading Xcode developers tools and installing, the FileMerge program isn't located in the Applications folder, but rather here:

[Hard Drive]/Developer/Applications/Utilities

When the program window opens, you can drag and drop folders into the two slots on the right marked "left" and "right". In the left side, I placed my existing install folder "public_html" and on the right I put "Joomla_1.5.7_to_1.5.9-Stable-Patch_Package" (the upgrade).

Then hit "compare".

Under "exclude" I left everything unchecked.

In the "view" drop down menu, I selected "merge".

In the file list on the far left, I selected all by clicking once at the top and then shift-clicking the last in the list.

Then in the "merge" drop down menu, I selected "combine files"

It will pop up a dialog window asking you to create a new folder or use an existing one. I created a folder on my desktop called "public_html_159" so I could differentiate from the existing install and test it before replacing everything.

Then FileMerge will run for a little while, copying into the new folder. Everything is just copied, so you still have both original folders left untouched.

Move the new folder into the same place as original install (test first with MAMP on localhost, or ftp it to your server).

If everything works okay, go ahead and replace the other entire folder with the new one.

Again, I'm new at this, so please let us know if anything I've suggested here is incorrect. This is just what seemed to have worked fine for me.

--Zack

iam new to joomla.say me how to upgrade in the system