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My company uses Mediawiki... a lot... unfortunately it hasn't been kept up to date. Its now my job to update it. I would really like any insights into this task.

Ubuntu 14.04.5 update to 18.04.1

Mediawiki 1.25.3 update to 1.31.1

Can I just update Ubuntu using sudo apt dist-upgrade without it effecting Mediawiki?

After removing some unsupported extensions can I just overwrite the existing wiki with the latest version without moving anything else?

I'm guessing this is going to be a lot harder than I imagine...

Any help is gratefully received and appreciated.

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You should probably create new instance of Ubuntu 18.04, deploy Mediawiki 1.31.1 and then start migrating content from older Mediawiki instance to a new one. If you try to update from 14.04 to 16.04 to 18.04, you'll most likely face a bunch of issues with broken dependencies, almost certainly break Mediawiki, and plethora of other issues. Also, if that's your only Mediawiki instance, you'll face serious downtime.

So if it was me who was tasked with this, I'd:

  1. Deploy Ubuntu 18.04 server.
  2. Install required dependencies and deploy newest Mediawiki on it.
  3. Export older Mediawiki database and import it into new one. I assume this will be the biggest issue. If this goes well, you're pretty much good to go, if not, you'll have to tackle potential database compatibility issues as they come. Here's relevant documentation.

With this approach you don't risk ruining old installation (hopefully you have backups as well), colleagues can keep using it while you're setting up new instance, and you have more room to make errors. Once you succeed, and test it properly, update DNS to point to the new instance, and you're good.

Good luck!

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