Upgrading/moving EmonCMS

I have an EmonCMS installation running that’s been going for quite some time - currently running v8.5. I read the upgrade page for EmonCMS, and before I attempt to delve into it, I note that it’s quite outdated - it’s listed as upgrading to v8 from previous versions. Since I’m upgrading from 8.5 to 9.7, does the guide still apply, or are there differences? The second half of my question is in Lieu of upgrading, is it possible to move the data from the existing 8.5 installation over to a clean 9.7 installation that I just set up, or will the version differences cause issues?

Side note: the install guide for EmonCMS does not work wit the latest build of Ubuntu (16.04.1 LTS). When you try to install all the components required, I don’t think any of them were found as valid packages to install, and some were replaced with ‘other’ things, such as MySQL, for example. I built this new 9.7 instance on Debian 8.6, which went off without a hitch.

That’s another concern with upgrading my 8.5 build which is running on Ubuntu - if there are dependencies that need to be upgraded for the latest EmonCMS, but Ubuntu has replaced them or otherwise can’t find them, it’ll most likely fail.

So what is the best way to approach this? upgrade the 8.5 instance to 9.7 then see if I can manage to back up everything and move it to the new server, or can I just move all the data over to the new 9.7 server?

Hi,

I went through the same sort of questions a few months ago.

What i did was set up a new folder in /var/www called emoncmsTesting, and then went into there and cloned the new emonCMS from Github.

I also installed phpmyadmin before doing all this as this allowed me to get a full backup of the database instead of doing the dump, I copied it to another name (again emoncmsTesting). If you’re on Debian / Ubuntu sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin.

This was all done on Ubuntu 14.01 mind you, however I have set up an Amazon AWS server on Ubuntu Server. I think it is 16.04 LTS (will double check soon), and it all installed fine, so should be good to go. I’ve not found any issues with it, so will be upgrading my main install to 16.04.

Generally my advice is to back up everything first then give it a try and restore it if needed.

jimmy

Just a quick reminder that if you are using any PHPfina, PHPfiwa or PHPtimeseries feed types the data is not held in mySQL tables and you must also back up the phpfins.phpfiwa and phptimeseries folders usually located in /var/lib/ or the data partition.

Fair point, i don’t use these engines, as they were not around when I started, i will add this to the other thread i have posted in today :slight_smile:

Hi, I don’t mean to hijack this thread but my situation is almost identical.

I’ve done the upgrade several times on WAMP to ensure everything was fine and sure enough all is beautiful.

I know this is going to be something stupidly simple, but right now, I’m at a loss.
New files are located in /var/www/html/emonNEW
Old working files are located in /var/www/html/emoncms

When I try to upgrade my “production” server on ubuntu 16.04 I get a page not found for any page other than the “main” page.


Not Found
The requested URL /emonNEW/admin/view was not found on this server.
Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at emonserver.athome Port 80

Hi Marc,

I think from the sound if it, it’s just a issue with the files not being there, however, I have a few diagnostic things to try.

How familiar with Linux commands are you?

I am assuming no knowledge here, so forgive me if I seem to be too basic.

Move to your home directory

cd ~

Once there we will make a few output files to upload to here as there may be quite a bit of output.

touch emonNewWWW.txt
touch apache.txt

Now to get the contents of the emonNEW folder and put the contents in the output file ready for upload

cd /var/www/html/emonNew
du -h > ~/emonNewWWW.txt

This is ready for upload now and will contain a list of all the files and folders (and their sizes of the emonNew folder

Now if you go to the apache folder

cd /etc/apache2

And put the contents in the apache file we created

cat apache2.conf > ~/apache.txt

If you then upload these to here, I / wee can have a look at what files are in the emonNew folder, their sizes, and also check the Apache config to make sure that things are setup as expected.

Jimmy

Grr, I was expecting an email notification about post here but got nothing.
Sorry for the late response Jimmy, I appreciate your help.

I’ll check the items you mention this evening when I get home.
I’m quite comfortable with the command line :wink:
Interestingly, last night I actually did a fresh install on a VM and got the same result.
Non operational emoncms.

Cheers

Hi again Jimmy, here you go. Files as requested.
Hmm. “New users cannot upload file”. I guess that’s not going to work right now.

The emonNEW directory is fully populated so that’s not the problem.
My apache configuration must also be good since my version 8.4.0 is working fine.

So my /var/www/html directory contains to directories.
emoncms (version 8.4.0) working perfectly
and
emonNEW (version 9.7.6) only serves up the login page.

Interestingly as I mentioned in my previous post.
A clean install of Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM and a fresh install of emoncms 9.7.6 exibits the exact same behaviour.
Login page only, no other functionality.

Any ideas?

Marc,

I adjusted your user account. You should be able to upload files now.

Only thing I can think of is Ubuntu has removed PHP 5.x from its repository now and replaced with php 7.

If I get a few mins at today (should do in between installing Windows 10 on a few PCS), I will set up a couple of VMs one with Ubuntu desktop and the other with Ubuntu Server both 16.04 and see if I can convince them to work as expected, or at least prove my theory.

EDIT:
Just out of curiosity what happens if you were to rename the emoncms folder to emonOLD, and the emonNEW to emoncms?

mv emoncms emonOLD && mv emonNEW emoncms

Just wondering if this is a folder thing…

Hi Jimmy, been there, done that.
No change.
I do suspect the version of php.
php -v shows v7.0.8

This installation started on Ubuntu 14.04 and has been updated/upgraded regularly.
I can only assume that emoncms 8.4 is using php 5.6 while 9.6 is attempting to use php 7.0
I have both /var/php5 and /var/php/7.0 on this system.

I’m going to try something else.
I’ll create VM with ubuntu 14.04 and see if I can get a stock emoncms working with that, then I’ll try a dist-upgrade.

Hmm. I’m starting to think there’s something wrong the emoncms 9.6/9.7 builds for linux.
Another fresh install of Ubuntu, this time 14.04.5, followed installation instructions to the letter.
Same behaviour, non-functional emoncms.
:frowning:

Odd, I have a working one on Ubuntu 16.04, had to amend the instructions a little as on git hub they mention installing the extensions to a folder that doesn’t exist due to it being php7.

The folder I put them in was
/etc/php/7.0/apache2 and
/etc/php/7.0/cli