updating Manually updating PW by renaming directorys, should i move modules from 'wire' to 'site' directory ?

[EyeDentify]

Hello There PW folks.

I have a few questions that i have thought about.

First let me start with that my way of updating PW is me uploading the 'wire' directory from the ZIP file that i usally rename 'wire_3.0.x' and whatever number X is for the moment and on the server side just renaming that uploaded directory to 'wire' after i rename the current 'wire' directory the same way i did with the uploaded one, just in case i want to roll back (with a little headache).

Now, i had the realisation that when doing this, i might not get any downloaded and installed modules to transfer over to the update directory when updating.
Is this true ?

And should i install modules in the 'site' directory under 'modules' there instead ?, could i just move currently installed modules in 'wire' to 'site' ?
Or would that break things ?

Do you see what i am trying to get at ?

It sounds confusing i know, sorry if this seem like a stupid question.

By the way, i rarely touch the '.htaccess' file in the PW root, how often should i check that for changes and include that in my upload ?
I don´t want to mess with it to much because it often makes my PW install unhappy.

 

[Jan Romero]

4 hours ago, EyeDentify said:

First let me start with that my way of updating PW is me uploading the 'wire' directory from the ZIP file that i usally rename 'wire_3.0.x' and whatever number X is for the moment and on the server side just renaming that uploaded directory to 'wire' after i rename the current 'wire' directory the same way i did with the uploaded one, just in case i want to roll back (with a little headache).

 That’s how you’re supposed to do it as far as I know. Just swap /wire/ and you’re done. See the docs for more details on .htaccess and /index.php, which you do sometimes need to update, but it doesn’t happen very often: https://processwire.com/docs/start/install/upgrade/

 

4 hours ago, EyeDentify said:

Now, i had the realisation that when doing this, i might not get any downloaded and installed modules to transfer over to the update directory when updating.

Non-core modules will be installed to /site/modules/ so they are not affected by PW updates. Don’t manually put modules into /wire/modules/! Indeed you should never* change anything in the /wire/ directory at all.

*Of course, feel free to hack on the core as much as you like, but you’ll need to take extra steps when updating to avoid wiping out your changes. And updates may break your modifications in other ways, I suppose.

4 hours ago, EyeDentify said:

could i just move currently installed modules in 'wire' to 'site' ?
Or would that break things ?

I’m not sure it’ll break anything, I guess you’ll have to test it ? ProcessWire caches some information about installed modules in the “caches” database table, so you may need to delete that? But generally I’d imagine things to go smoothly.

 

4 hours ago, EyeDentify said:

By the way, i rarely touch the '.htaccess' file in the PW root, how often should i check that for changes and include that in my upload ?
I don´t want to mess with it to much because it often makes my PW install unhappy.

Yeah, if you update .htaccess you need to make sure to keep the changes you made to suit your environment. It rarely changes, though, so it’s not too messy to just check out the last handfull of diffs and see what you may need to add: https://github.com/processwire/processwire/commits/dev/htaccess.txt. As you can see, the last change was in January, but I’ve gone back a couple of years and really nothing critical happened.

[EyeDentify]

Thank you @Jan Romero for your answers.

I just want to say that i had no intention of hacking anything.

It´s just that i noticed that i downloaded the Front-Edit module and it seems not to be in the core, and it´s installed in 'wire'.

So my question is, are that module going to be wiped out next time i upgrade 'wire' ?

[wbmnfktr]

23 minutes ago, EyeDentify said:

It´s just that i noticed that i downloaded the Front-Edit module and it seems not to be in the core, and it´s installed in 'wire'.

That'a a core module. So it's in the /wire/ folder for a reason as it is part of ProcessWire itself. In this case you also don't download it, you just activate it. Nothing to worry here as well.

[EyeDentify]

1 minute ago, wbmnfktr said:

That'a a core module. So it's in the /wire/ folder for a reason as it is part of ProcessWire itself. In this case you also don't download it, you just activate it. Nothing to worry here as well.

Ok, i see. Thanks for clearing that up.
I seem to have been confused this week.
Discovered that i had not updated the TracyDebuger module for at least 1-2 years. So i did that also. Things work better with Tracy now for some reason.

[Jan Romero]

7 minutes ago, EyeDentify said:

Discovered that i had not updated the TracyDebuger module for at least 1-2 years.

Did your hoster send you a scary email about the old Adminer script containing known vulnerabilities? Cause that happened to me ?

[EyeDentify]

4 minutes ago, Jan Romero said:

Did your hoster send you a scary email about the old Adminer script containing known vulnerabilities? Cause that happened to me ?

No, no such e-mail.

But i got an angry error message from TracyDebugger when going to the Adminer part of Tracy.
So i looked up the module page on ProcessWire homepage and compared the version with mine and got a chock.
Updated it at once and everything was smooth sailing.