Home → Installation and Upgrade Manual → Upgrading HelpSpot 5 → Minor Version Upgrades (v5)

2.1. Minor Version Upgrades (v5)

These instruction apply to minor version upgrades. For example: v5.0.45->5.0.58. For major version upgrades (v4 to v5) see the separate upgrade documentation as the process is a bit different.

Backup

It's strongly recommended that you backup your HelpSpot database and files before upgrading. It's especially important to backup files if you have customized your templates or edited the language file.

The installer will make database changes during an upgrade. If something goes wrong the only way to roll back the changes is if you have an up to date backup.

Upgrading Files

Before beginning review the latest system requirements to make sure that the software installed on your server are compatible with the latest version.

If you have a version of HelpSpot 5 already installed you can always upgrade to latest version. There is not a need for intermediary upgrades ever if you have missed some upgrades.

After downloading the newest version of HelpSpot, move the files to your server and unpack the tar.gz or zip file in a temporary location.

1. Stop your supervisor or systemd queue worker.
   Ubuntu/Redhat:

   sudo supervisorctl stop all

   Windows:

   Navigate to Windows Services and stop the HelpSpotQueue service and the HelpSpotSchedule service.

2. Move your current helpspot install directory to a backup location (we'll need to restore some files from this backup).
3. Copy your new helpspot package to that same location where HelpSpot was installed
4. Copy these directories and files back into your production helpspot folder.
   
   

   Note, you will want to preserve the permissions of these directories. On Windows robocopy does this for you with the /copyall option on the command line. If you are using Explorer on Windows or the Linux cp command this should handle this for you automatically.

   File / Directory	Description
   .env	Environment Configuration File
   storage/documents	Attachment Storage
   storage/app	Application Storage for Jobs
   helpspot/custom_pages	Custom Page Code
   public/custom_code	Custom Code (AD/LDAP Auth, Live Lookup, etc.)
   public/custom_templates	Custom Portal Templates
   public/web.config	Copy this file if you have custom IIS settings
   helpers/windows	On Windows installations this contains the needed configuration files for the HelpSpot windows services.
   helpspot/helpspot/lang/customlanguagepacks	Copy back over any custom language packs you may have in the lang folder. Do not copy the default english-us or core language pack.
   Any secondary portal sites or other custom code you have defined

 

Note: The HelpSpot files are binary and your FTP program will most likely upload them as text unless you tell it to use binary mode. This is why it's recommended to move the compressed file (tar.gz/zip) directly to the server first which will avoid any problems. After uploading if you get a file corrupted or Fatal error in your browser at the installer then the files have been uploaded as text instead of binary.

Reset Permissions

The permissions on the bootstrap/cache and the storage directory need to be writable by the web servers process. In Windows IIS installations this is the done by adding the IUSR with full permissions. On linux you will need to add the user that you webserver is operating under (often www-data).

Upgrade Database

The best way to upgrade the database is by using command line php. From your HelpSpot directory run:

php hs update

You can find more info on the HelpSpot command line here: The HelpSpot Command Line

Restart Queue (v5.0.0+)

After upgrading complete we need to ensure that the queue is using the latest code. We'll need to start the queue worker:

Ubuntu/Redhat:

sudo supervisorctl start all

Windows:

Navigate to Windows Services and start the HelpSpotQueue service and the HelpSpotSchedule service.