Updating SeedDMS to 6.0.36 or 5.1.43

SeedDMS 6.0.36 and 5.1.43 have some major changes, which may require to tweak your existing installation. Those changes affect the way SeedDMS is installed on disc and should be taken into account when updating your installation. It does not have any impact on the documents stored in SeedDMS. There is also a new console tool, which eases some administrative operations, like installing and updating extensions. This will be officially supported and can be enhanced by extensions.

The pear directory no longer exists

The pear directory has been around for a long time containing external PHP libraries and some SeedDMS core libraries. In the latest versions of SeedDMS only the directory vendor has been left in the pear directory. That’s why the vendor directory was moved out of it and pear was deleted. As a consequence the extraPath configuration in settings.xml is no longer required and should be emptied.

The directory www has several soft links. Most of them are unchanged, but the links to index.php and .htaccess must be updated.

cd www
rm index.php; ln -s ../seeddms/www/index.php
rm .htaccess; ln -s ../seeddms/www/.htaccess

Updating extensions

There are several internal changes which may affect and possibly break extensions. If you run into problems after updating SeedDMS, you should disable all your extensions, than update SeedDMS and all extensions, and afterwards enable the extensions again.

New console tool

The directory utils contains several command line tools, which were used by several users, but were never officially supported. Some of them have now been replaced by a single tool utils/console, which is officially supported. Some new commands were added and the old scripts are still around, but will not be maintained anymore. Just call utils/console list for a list of commands.

You may need to run the new console tool with sudo -u, because some commands modify files on disc. Use the Linux user which is also used for running your web server. You may even try to run the console tool without sudo -u. The tool will tell you, if the access rights are not sufficient. Do not run this tool as root, because it may create files, which afterwards cannot be purged by the user running your web server, e.g. when updating the list of available extensions.