Update

SeedDMS 6.0.36 and 5.1.43 has some major updates which may require to tweak your existing installation.

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.

SeedDMS comes with rather detailed instructions on how to install and update the software. It’s all described in the file doc/README.Install.md which is part of the quickstart archive. This article focuses on a very special but quite regular case, when SeedDMS is updated without changing the major and minor version number. Hence, all updates within the SeedDMS 5.1.x or 6.0.x series, e.g. from 6.0.22 to 6.0.28.

SeedDMS’ folder structure on disk is designed to be secure and easily updateable. The parts to be replaced during an update are located in two directories in the base directory named pear and seeddms-5.1.x or seeddms-6.0.x. All other directories remain unchanged. This is achieved by soft links within the directory www and it enforced to run SeedDMS on a platform supporting soft links. If this in not the case, this article may still be useful to understand the update process but you will have to dereference the links yourself.