Choose a method for transferring files:

• wget
• Secure copy withSCP orWinSCP
• SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Using aFTP client.
• The hosting company might provide a file manager interface via the web browser; check with your provider.
• Some other method. There is a list of these atComparison of file transfer protocols

Readthe UPGRADE text file included in MediaWiki.

1. Check the requirements
2. Read the RELEASE-NOTES file
3. Read the UPGRADE file
4. Back up existing files and the database
5. Unpack the new files
6. Upgrade extensions
7. Run the update script to check the database
8. Test the update
9. Remove leftovers from old installations

Warning:

MediaWiki versions 1.32 through 1.35.4, 1.36.2, and 1.37.0 contain a security issue that allow unprivileged editing of arbitrary pages and arbitrary JavaScript execution. If you are using one of these versions and can not upgrade to a newer version, please see2021-12 security release/FAQ for a workaround.

MediaWiki 1.44 requires:

• PHP 8.1.0+
• One of the following:
  • MariaDB 10.3.0+
  • MySQL 5.7.0+
  • PostgreSQL 10.0+
  • SQLite3.24.0+

If you are using PostgreSQL, please also readManual:Upgrading Postgres.

For more information, please read theManual:Installation requirements andCompatibility.

Within the distribution tarball, or within the files checked out/exported fromGit, there are a number of files with capitalized filenames, one of which contains theRELEASE-NOTES (wiki).Now's the time to open it up and find out what's been changed in this release.You should also read the instructions in the UPGRADE file.

For performance reasons, some actions in the database are delayed, and are managed by thejob queue.Those jobs are stored in database and contain parameters with information about actions it should perform.It's strongly recommended to run those pending jobs before upgrading the wiki, to avoid them failing in case the parameter specification of those jobs change on the new version.UserunJobs.php to run all pending jobs and clear the queue before performing the upgrade.

Full instructions:Manual:Backing up a wiki

While the upgrade scripts are well-maintained and robust, things could still go awry. Before proceeding to update the database schema,make a fullbackup of the wiki, including both the database and the files:

• the wiki's content, from the database, (make sure you get the character set specified correctly, first checkLocalSettings.php). It may be a good idea to create an XML dump in addition to the SQL database dump.

• MySQL, both SQL dump and XML dump are for use with themysql command:

mysqldump --user=wikidb_user --password=wikidb_userpasswordwikidb >file.sqlmysqldump --user=wikidb_user --password=wikidb_userpasswordwikidb --xml >file.xml

• PostgreSQL, database dump for use withpg_restore command:

pg_dump --create -Fcwikidb >file.db.dump

• SQLite, you use a MediaWiki script for making a backup:

phpwikifolder/maintenance/run.php SqliteMaintenance --backup-tofile

• images and other media files (the contents of theimages directory, custom logo /skins/common/images/wiki.png)
• configuration files, e.g.LocalSettings.php and.htaccess (if present)
• MediaWiki's program files, including all skins and extensions, especially if you modified them.

You can put the new files into place using FTP or the command line. Use the command line, if you have access to it! Using the command line will be much faster than having to upload each single one of the thousands of files via FTP.

If you cannot access the command line on your server, download the MediaWiki tarball to your local computer and use7zip to extract the tarball on your local PC.

After you extracted the files locally, use your favorite FTP client software to upload directories and files to the server.

cPanel is a popular interface provided by many web hosts.This method is efficient because the files are uncompressed on the server itself.

• Navigate to the directory that holds your wiki folder.
• Upload the mediawiki-1.xx.x.tar.gz file. You may need to hit "Reload" to see it.
• Extract the mediawiki-1.xx.x.tar.gz file. Reload again.
• Confirm that the mediawiki-1.xx.x folder is present.
• Delete the tar.gz file.
• Copy all necessary skins, extensions, image folders, customizations, and theLocalSettings.php into the new folder. (See below.)
• When you are ready to run update.php, rename your old wiki folder and your new wiki folder. (e.g. "w" becomes "w1.34" and then "mediawiki1.35.0" becomes "w".) This step is easily reversible if you run into problems.

You may need to run the command assudo if you don't have full write permissions to the wiki install directories under your current user.When untarring a tarball package normally a new directory for the new wiki version will be created and you will have to copy the old configuration files and images directory from your old installation directory:

cd /path/to/your/new/installation/ wgethttps://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.44/mediawiki-1.44.2.tar.gztar xvzf mediawiki-1.44.2.tar.gzrm mediawiki-1.44.2.tar.gz

(Open)Solaris users should usegtar, or:

$ gzip -dc mediawiki-1.44.2.tar.gz | tar xf -

After extracting the tarball, you should copy or move some files and folders from the old installation directory to the new one:

• LocalSettings.php - contains your old configuration settings.
• Theimages (oruploads in older versions) directory, which contains all the uploaded files to the wiki, unless you have chosen a different upload directory, and change the ownership and permissions.find ./images -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \; andchgrp -R apache images (e.g. if your web user isapache).
• Some extensions in theextensions directory. You should always get updated extensions; old extensions aren't guaranteed to work with a newer version of MediaWiki.
• In case you use acustom logo this file also needs to be restored from backup. Before 1.24 the logo is usually inskins/common/images/. After 1.24 the logo is usually inresources/assets/ orimages/ if that's what you chose to use. Then add toLocalSettings.php e.g.$wgLogo="$wgScriptPath/images/logo.png";
• For 1.35 you may need to restore the logos fromwgLogos. Then add toLocalSettings.php e.g.$wgLogos=['1x'=>"path/to/1x_version.png",'2x'=>"path/to/2x_version.png",'svg'=>"path/to/svg_version.svg"];
• Custom skins from within theskins directory.
• Any modifications made to the old installation files or extensions.
• Any .htaccess file (if you're using Apache and you've defined any rules in them).

Once done, make this new folder the published folder on the web server, or rename the old installation directory and then rename the new one to match the old name.Change ownership and group of everything so the web server has access to the files.

If usingGit, export the files into a clean location, and then copy the old customized files into the new location as described in the previous section.

You will also need to install some external PHP libraries using Composer or a provided collection maintained for the Wikimedia wiki farm.More details on installing and updating external libraries can be found in theGit download documentation.

A small patch file is usually made available for a minor version upgrade.You'll need to downloadpatch to use this.Manually download and extract the patch file fromthe dumps site or follow the directions with wget below.Patches are incremental, you cannot skip a version.

1. cd to your main MediaWiki directory (the one withLocalSettings.php).
2. Download the patch file andgunzip it.
3. Usepatch -p1 --dry-run to check what will be changed (e.g.,patch -p1 --dry-run -imediawiki-x.xx.x.patch)
4. If all is well, runpatch again without--dry-run.
5. Check your Special:Version and you should see the new version number in place.

If you unpacked over the old installation directory, some old files can cause problems with the new version.

Certain extensions have been updated in order to work with the new version of MediaWiki. Be sure to upgrade to the latest versions of such extensions. You might need to perform manual updates to custom extensions.

Differenttarballs include some subsets of extensions and have versioning which helps you upgrade choosing the right one for your MediaWiki core release.

Extension Distributor works well for most people who want a snapshot of extensions that will work with their supported versions of MediaWiki.

If you want a lot of extensions thendownloading from Git is probably best.If you don't have Git but you want to upgrade a lot of extensions, you might consider usingmwExtUpgrader.

If you use the sameLocalSettings.php from the old version, you may need to adapt it to how new versions handle it:

Since MediaWiki 1.24, bundled skins like Vector, Monobook, Modern and CologneBlue are no longer part of MediaWiki core, and they need to be registered explicitly inLocalSettings.php to use them, otherwise MediaWiki will warn that you don't have installed skins.

This is what you need to add toLocalSettings.php when upgrading from versions older than 1.24 and want to have available one of those skins:

wfLoadSkin('Vector');wfLoadSkin('MonoBook');wfLoadSkin('Modern');wfLoadSkin('CologneBlue');

Other skins may still not be adapted to the newskin registration system, so refer to the documentation page about each skin to see how to register it properly in case of problems.

Since MediaWiki 1.25, extensions use a newextension registration system.

Previously yourLocalSettings.php would include something like:

require_once"$IP/extensions/Cite/Cite.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/Gadgets/Gadgets.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/ImageMap/ImageMap.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/InputBox/InputBox.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/Nuke/Nuke.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/ParserFunctions/ParserFunctions.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/Poem/Poem.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi.php";require_once"$IP/extensions/WikiEditor/WikiEditor.php";

This can be converted to:

wfLoadExtension('Cite');wfLoadExtension('Gadgets');wfLoadExtension('ImageMap');wfLoadExtension('InputBox');wfLoadExtension('Nuke');wfLoadExtension('ParserFunctions');wfLoadExtension('Poem');wfLoadExtension('SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi');wfLoadExtension('WikiEditor');

Extensions are being adapted to use the new extension registration system.Extensions that are not adapted should use the old way of installing them.Refer to the installation instructions on the extension's page for more information.

Older versions of MediaWiki automatically generated a line in LocalSettings.php callingDefaultSettings.php.As of Version 1.38, this line is deprecated and does not work with many extensions.It needs to be removed.

Delete the following line:

require_once("$IP/includes/DefaultSettings.php");

If you are upgrading to 1.40 or above,Extension:RenameUser has been merged into core.If present, this line must be deleted from LocalSettings.php or the update will fail.

wfLoadExtension('Renameuser');

If you are upgrading to 1.44 or above,Extension:Interwiki has been merged into core.If present, this line must be deleted from LocalSettings.php.

wfLoadExtension('Interwiki');

Please be sure to checkNew user-facing features in 1.44 for some Interwiki settings that have been removed or renamed.

Some variables may be obsolete or even removed.Having them inLocalSettings.phpusually won't have any effect.New variables may be added in newer versions, or some existing variables changed their type.We usually try to use sane defaults for them, and in case of type change, be backward compatible.In any case, take a look at the release notes to see those changes.

You can upgrade the MediaWiki database in two ways: Either from the command line or from the web browser. If you have shell access to your server, upgrading from the command line is recommended, since this reduces the risk of the upgrade process being interrupted by a timeout or connection reset.

The script will also notify you if any of MediaWiki core's PHP dependencies are out of date.

Access the command line of your server or an SSH shell or similar. You can access the command line by connecting to your server via SSH.Current versions of all major operating systems (including Windows 10 and 11) contain a command-lineOpenSSH client either by default or as an installable feature.If the local PC you are working on runs Microsoft Windows, you may want to (or, if it’s 8.1 or older, have to) installPuTTY, which features a wizard-like interface (or a similar tool).From the command line or the Shell, execute theupdate script:

$ php maintenance/run.php update

$ php maintenance/update.php

On a Linux server if you get an error, try performing the same command as root (by using thesudo command).Note for simple installations on Windows (e.g. withXAMPP):First make sure that your web server (such as Apache) and your database (such as MySQL) are running.Then runupdate.php: right-click it, select Open With, and browse to PHP.exe.The resulting command prompt window will likely autoclose when the schema upgrade completes.

MediaWiki will inspect the existing schema and update it to work with the new code, adding tables and columns as needed.

SeeManual:Common errors and symptoms#MediaWiki requires PHP 7.4.3 or higher; you are using PHP 7.3.17

This can be caused by a malfunctioning extension or skin.

• Check that all extensions and skins called for in LocalSettings.php are present
• Check that extensions are using the correct registration method (wfLoadExtension vs. require_once)
• Comment out the first half of the extensions in LocalSettings.php. If this causes update.php to work, uncomment half of that half (so 1/4 of the extensions). If this does NOT cause update.php to work, uncomment the first half but comment out the second half, and then comment out half of the second half, etc. Repeat until update.php works to find the one that is failing.

In case the scripts abort with a message similar to:

Error: 1142 ALTER command denied to user 'wiki'@'localhost' for table 'mytable' (localhost)ERROR: must be the owner of the mytable relation

This means that you should check that you have defined$wgDBadminuser and$wgDBadminpassword in yourLocalSettings.php file (in the main directory). These are the user and password needed by this script in order to access to the database.

In some cases, an old $wgDBmwschema variable (for Postgres) seems to be read for the table name to update instead of $wgDBname, even when MySQL is used.If this is the case, just get rid of the$wgDBmwschema definition inLocalSettings.php.

You may encounter the error:

Cannot get command line arguments, register_argc_argv is set to false

1. Go to ~/maintenance. Either edit an existing 'php.ini' file, or create one.
2. Add a line as follows:

register_argc_argv=true

1. Re-runphp update.php

See alsoupdate.php

If your database is already big and in high production usage, then you should not be using the Web updater, e.g. because the update process will time out when themaximum_execution_time is reached. In that case you should useupdate.php from the command-line interface (not from the web). What exactly is "too big" depends on your server (e.g. on its performance, the load and on how long the maximum execution time of PHP allows the script to run). If your wiki is too big for the web updater and your hosting provider does not allow command-line access, then you need to migrate your wiki to another hosting account, preferably to one that does have shell access.

1. Alwaysback up before performing database maintenance.
2. Navigate your web browser to/mw-config/index.php. For example, if your wiki is athttp://example.org/w/index.php, then navigate tohttp://example.org/w/mw-config/index.php.
3. Select your language and click continue.
4. The existing installation should be detected. Follow the instructions on the screen to upgrade it.
   If asked for the "upgrade key", open yourLocalSettings.php file and look for the key assigned to$wgUpgradeKey.

It might happen that the web-updater does not seem to work: Instead of seeing the initial language selection screen, you might see an empty wiki page, possibly with some error message. In this case it is most likely that your web server uses Rewrite Rules (most likely forshort URLs), which do not show you the updater atmw-config/, but a wiki page atMw-config/, with capital "M". In this case, rename the.htaccess file for the time of the update. Then you should be able to access the web-updater.

Warning:

If you use this method, make sure tochange the name of the .htaccess file back after running the upgrade script! Otherwise, short URLs and possibly other stuff will be broken!

Once the upgrade has been completed, browse to the wiki and check that the following operations work as expected:

• Viewing pages
• Editing pages
• Uploading a file
• VisitSpecial:Version and check that the version shown is correct and that the extensions are present.

If you have copied your previous installation to another folder on the server, be sure to remove it or make it completely inaccessible from the web.It is very important to not leave old installations accessible from the web, since it completely defeats the purpose of upgrading, and leaves your server open to attacks.

If the only file you have modified isLocalSettings.php, and you are upgrading from 1.5 or later, the process is very simple. The amount of human work involved is only a few minutes. The database schema changes will take an amount of time proportional to the size of your database — potentially hours for wikis with millions of pages, but for a more typical size of a few thousand pages, it is usually done in seconds.

Minor upgrades, within the same major version, say from 1.43.0 to 1.43.5, do not require any schema changes at all.You can just update the files. The database needs no update, hence it is not necessary to run the updater script.

Upgrading from 1.4 or earlier is potentially complicated because support for character sets other than UTF-8 was dropped, and the schema for storing bulk text changed. Please read the relevant section in theUPGRADE file.

Upgrading becomes difficult if you have modified our source code, and you don't want your changes to be overwritten. Tools such asdiff,patch,Meld orWinMerge may be useful. There is also potential for trouble if you are using unmaintained extensions. Upgrade your extensions at the same time as you upgrade MediaWiki.

If you have modified the skin or use a custom skin, you very likely will have to adjust it to work again with the new version of MediaWiki.

It depends: If you areupgrading from MediaWiki 1.4 or older, you should upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5 first.If you are upgrading from a Latin-1 wiki, use upgrade1_5.php (found in MediaWiki 1.5) to convert the relevant parts of the database to UTF-8 ($wgUseLatin1 needs to be set to true in yourLocalSettings.php for this to work).Next, runupdate.php, and then set the$wgLegacyEncoding option inLocalSettings.php to the encoding previously used by the wiki (e.g. windows-1252). This is basically how Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation sites were upgraded from MediaWiki 1.4 to 1.5 – see somerelated notes at Wikitech.You may need to upgrade to MediaWiki 1.4 before running the upgrade1.5 script.If you want to make a database dump (e.g. MySQL) of your Latin-1 wiki, make sure the type of theold_text field in thetext table ismediumblob, notmediumtext, to avoid character encoding issues.

If you areupgrading from MediaWiki 1.5 or newer to1.35, you can upgrade in one step, from your old version to the latest stable version.The vast majority of reports, as well as automated testing, indicate that doing it in one step works just fine.If you have trouble believing this, readthis mailing list post.However, please note that when you update from old versions, chances that you will encounter PHP errors are bigger than when you upgrade from the version directly previous to the new version.You would have received these errors anyway, had you not skipped versions, but the errors would have been associated with each individual update.Instead, if you update several versions at once, you'll get the same set of errors all at the same time.This will make the upgrade more difficult, but do not forget that you did not have the trouble of updating to the intermediate versions, which you skipped!

If you areupgrading to MediaWiki 1.36 or later, only upgrades from the last two LTS releases will be supported (phab:T259771). This will mean that for very old versions, that you first upgrade to MediaWiki 1.35 and then upgrade to 1.36.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: It depends on a) how much you value your data, b) how hard it is to create a backup and c) how confident you are with MySQL maintenance and administration.

An upgrade failure may leave your database in an inconsistent state, in between two versions.A PHP or MySQL error might happen during upgrade leaving your database partly upgraded.In such situations it may be possible to somehow fix this problem with much manual work.However, it will beway easier to just put a database backup from before running update.php in place and to continue with that.Otherwise you might have hours of - needless - work.

Recovery is often complex.Volunteers on the support forums are unlikely to be impressed if you neglect to make a backup and then need help to recover from upgrade-related corruption.A better outcome is if you can revert to your backup, and thenreport the bug against the corresponding MediaWiki project in the upgrade process which caused the corruption.

Yes, but you may have to make some minor changes. The format ofLocalSettings.php is largely backward compatible.Changes which break LocalSettings.php compatibility will be documented in the "configuration changes" section of therelease notes.

Generally yes, however if you upgrade via Git, Git may temporarily (for a few seconds) break it.

If you are upgrading between minor releases of MediaWiki, all you need to do is update the source files.

Note: the following assumes you have command line access. If you are upgrading between major releases of MediaWiki, the preferred procedure is as follows:

1. Unpack the new version of MediaWiki into a new directory
2. Prepare that new directory: copy your currentLocalSettings.php from the old directory, copy any installed extensions and custom skins (if any). Check$wgLogo and$wgLogos settings inLocalSettings.php and if necessary copy logo file from the old directory to the new directory.
3. In the release notes for the new version, see if any changes need to be made toLocalSettings.php.
4. In the old directory, edit LocalSettings.php and insert the following code. This will place the database in read-only mode for regular wiki activity, without restricting your own update actions. Users will see the message provided if they attempt an edit during the upgrade process:
   
   $adminTask = (PHP_SAPI ==='cli' ||defined('MEDIAWIKI_INSTALL' ) );
   $wgReadOnly = $adminTask ?false :'Upgrading to MediaWiki 1.44.2';
5. Run theupdate script or the web updater in the new directory.
6. Copy the images from the images sub-directory from the old directory to the new directory.
7. Swap the old directory and the new directory. (This will make the database writable again, because$wgReadOnly was only set in the old directory's LocalSettings.php.)

Subscribe tomediawiki-announce to be notified of new releases.

Recent releases receive security fixes to keep your wiki and your host safe from vandals, while old releases don't (seeVersion lifecycle).

New major releases come with new features, which you might want to use: see therelease notes for details.

• Greg Sabino Mullane's Blog post provides somemore detail about point release upgrades.
• Help and Support if you need help or something went wrong
• Category:MediaWiki deprecated or obsolete features
• Manual:Backing up a wiki
• Manual:Restoring a wiki from backup
• Manual:Moving a wiki
• Manual:Restoring wiki code from cached HTML - if you don't have a successful backup
• Manual:Installing MediaWiki

• MediaWiki administration
• MediaWiki for site admins
• MediaWiki development
• Upgrading