PmWiki is designed to make it easy to upgrade the Pm Wiki software without affecting your existing data files or installation. For most upgrades, you simply copy the files in the new release over your existing installation.
Note for Pm Wiki 1.0 sites: Upgrading from 1.0.x to 2.0 requires more than simply copying the 2.0 software over the 1.0 installation. See Upgrading From PmWiki 1 for more details.
Please read carefully the ReleaseNotes before performing an upgrade, about the changes between your previous version and the new one. See if there are any significant changes or preparation tasks that must be handled before performing the upgrade.
It's always a good idea to have a backup copy of your existing Pm Wiki installation before starting. You can copy the entire directory containing your existing installation, or you can just make copies of the wiki.d/ directory and any other local customization files you may have created (e.g., config.php, localmap.txt, etc.).
Download the version of Pm Wiki that you want from the download page.
Extract the tar image using tar -xvzf tgzfile, where tgzfile is the tar file you downloaded above. This will create a pmwiki-x.y.z directory with the new version of the software.
Copy the files in pmwiki-x.y.z over the files of your existing Pm Wiki installation. For example, if your existing Pm Wiki installation is in a directory called pmwiki, then one way to copy the new files over the existing ones is to enter the command:
cp -a pmwiki-x.y.z/. pmwiki
Note that BSD systems will not have the -a option as a command-line argument for cp, but that's okay, since it's just shorthand for cp -dpR, so use that instead of -a.
Some environments have an alias established for cp that enable interactive prompts before overwriting a file. To work around this specify the absolute path to cp, such as /bin/cp.
On (some) FreeBSD servers and Mac OS X systems you need to use
cp -Rpv pmwiki-x.y.z/. pmwiki
That's it! Your base Pm Wiki installation is complete.
Now use the PmWiki:Site Analyzer to determine which recipes could be updated to the most recent version.
Unless you have made customizations to the pmwiki.php script or to the files in scripts/, your Pm Wiki installation should continue to run correctly! (Changes to these files are not recommended).
(Local customizations should go in local/config.php, pub/css, and pub/skins/yourskinname)
Note: Additional tips can be found on the PmWiki:Troubleshooting page.
How can I determine what version of Pm Wiki I'm running now?
See version - Determining and displaying the current version of Pm Wiki (pmwiki-2.2.24).
How can I test a new version of Pm Wiki on my wiki without changing the prior version used by visitors?
The easy way to do this is to install the new version in a separate directory, and for the new version set (in local/config.php):
$WikiLibDirs = array(&$WikiDir,
new PageStore('/path/to/existing/wiki.d/{$FullName}'),
new PageStore('wikilib.d/{$FullName}'));
This lets you test the new version using existing page content without impacting the existing site or risking modification of the pages. (Of course, any recipes or local customizations have to be installed in the new version as well.)
Then, once you're comfortable that the new version seems to work as well as the old, it's safe to upgrade the old version (and one knows of any configuration or page changes that need to be made).