Updating your installation

Keeping your installation up to date means you get new features and bug fixes implemented by other users of the platform.

Please read the guidelines for feeding back changes – if you follow those when working on your site it should be much easier for you to keep your code up to date with upstream. In the best case scenario, if you submit frequent pull requests and keep up to date, you shouldn’t run into many conflicts at all.

If your cobrand is not present upstream, then you may want to check changes in core templates against your cobrand before updating – we have a script to help with that.

Updating the code itself

The master branch of the main FixMyStreet repository should always be safe, stable, and deployable. On top of that, we have fixed version numbers that our install script and packaged options use, and you are welcome to as well.

Let’s say you have forked the main FixMyStreet repository on GitHub, and you have cloned your fork and have been working on that. You have made some commits that you have not yet submitted upstream to be merged in. GitHub have some helpful instructions on pulling in upstream changes, and it basically boils down to:

# If you haven't set up the remote before
git remote add upstream https://github.com/mysociety/fixmystreet.git
# Fetch new commits from upstream
git fetch upstream
# Merge those commits into your current branch
# Or whichever version tag e.g. v2.5
git merge upstream/master

If you’re proficient with git, of course feel free to rebase your changes on top of the upstream master, or however else you wish to best go about the issue :-) Doing this frequently will help prevent you get in a situation where you are too worried to merge in case it breaks something.

Subsequent dependency updates

After updating the code, you should run the following commands to update any needed dependencies and any schema changes to your database. It’s a good idea to take a backup of your database first.

sudo bin/install_packages # (as your admin user)
script/update # (as the fms user)

Of course, if you have made changes to the database schema yourself, this may not work, please feel free to contact us to discuss it first.

Restart the server

Lastly, you should restart your application server, this may be restarting your webserver, or if it is running separately, something like:

sudo service fixmystreet restart