⬆️

Upgrading Mediawiki

Nobody expects a smooth upgrade

I’ve just spent quite a bit of time doing an upgrade for the STC MediaWiki instance. This post might be a little rambly. That reflects the mind of someone doing intense troubleshooting for hours.

For the most part, their upgrade guide was wonderful, and thorough, and had well documented some errors.

ERROR

The error I was stuck on happened when I would run update.php to migrate the database, which gave the error:

...bach conversion of user_options: PHP Fatal error:  Class 'DOMDocument' not found in /var/www/html/wiki/includes/LocalisationCache.php on line 542

When accessing it via the web, I get an “HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error)” at every point now that I’ve upgraded the files. Looking at the log files on the server helped a lot. Apparently, the crippling error was:

PHP Fatal error:  Class 'DOMDocument' not found in /var/www/html/wiki/includes/LocalisationCache.php on line 542

(Sometimes I also got errors from extensions I didn’t intend to have enabled, from copying over the old LocalSettings.php and forgetting to toggle them off.)

Solution maybe?

MediaWiki’s documentation documentation shows a similar error and the fix for it, but no dice.

I can’t sudo yum install php-xml

Adding the silly line $wgParserConf['preprocessorClass'] = 'Preprocessor_Hash'; doesn’t do anything.

From running phpinfo(); on the server it looks like xml is enabled. I don’t have access to install the package again.

Database Crawling

And once it crashed, I had to reload the database or nothing else would work, of course. It took a good 15 minutes each time I had to.

• I could not upgrade 1.18.0 => 1.21.0
• I could not upgrade 1.18.0 => 1.20.0
• I could upgrade 1.18.0 => 1.19.0 => 1.20.0, but not all the way to 1.21.0

The Solution!

I don’t have one yet. It might be having a more privileged admin install that package php-xml?