This blog post is aimed at users of the MediaWiki software that have extensions installed, and want to upgrade one or more to a version that makes use of Composer. At present this is of particular relevance for those upgrading to SMW 1.9 beta or Maps 3.0 alpha.
If you are not yet familiar with the installation procedure of extensions using Composer, please read the documentation first.
In short, what needs to be done is (partially) removing the extensions that will be upgraded, and then following the standard installation instructions linked above. This comes down to following these steps:
- Identify the extensions that will be upgraded. This includes any dependencies they might have. For instance, if you have SMW 1.8 installed, you will also have the Validator extension installed.
- For all these extensions, remove the include statements you have in your LocalSettings.php file.
- For all these extensions, remove their code located in the extensions directory.
- Install the removed extensions again, though this time using Composer.
- Do any of the standard upgrading work that might need to be done. For instance running maintenance/update.php or specifying configuration in LocalSettings.php.
It is perfectly possible to have extensions installed via Composer while having others installed in the old, manual, way. Do however keep in mind that there can be no overlap between the two systems. For instance, if you are installing SMW, and it’s Validator dependency, then you should not replace the automatically installed version of Validator with an older version you manually obtained.