7 Days of Urchin 7: Day 2 – Installation

In the first post in this series, I went briefly into the new features and updates Urchin 7 has brought along. But before we can actually get into the new features, we need to update our existing Urchin 6 installation to Urchin 7.

The nice thing about updating from 6 to 7 is that unlike the upgrade from 5 to 6, 6 to 7 uses the same underlying data table structure. So no migration of data is necessary. All I had to do was go through the upgrade process, activate the Urchin 7 license and voila! All the existing data was there. An unexpected benefit – the set of default segments in the reporting interface worked immediately!

Here are the steps you’ll need to do to perform the update. These instructions are for Linux-based OS’s, but similar instructions should apply for Windows. For the upgrade, I was using an existing installation of Urchin 6.602. Any version in the 6 series should be just as painless. However, if you are upgrading from 5 directly to 7, you’ll need to take additional steps to migrate your existing data.

1. (Optional) Take some screen shots of your existing reports. I just took a screen shot of the dashboards. That way, you can compare the numbers reported by Urchin 7 as a sanity check.
2. Stop all Urchin services using the command “urchinctl stop”
3. Back up your current installation. See that in bold? I can’t stress this step enough!
   1. Backup your database using either mysqldump (if you use MySQL) or pg_dump (if you use PostgreSQL)
   2. Archive your Urchin installation folder using zip or some other archiving program. I prefer archive versus a folder copy because with folder copy, I find that the Urchin activation codes get invalidated.
   3. If you specified alternative directories for data, htdocs or other folders, be sure to archive those folders as well!
4. Run the installer (install.sh)
   1. Choose your language
   2. Choose the upgrade option (option 2)
   3. Enter details such as
      1. urchin stall directories and webserver port number
      2. user & group for file permission ownership
      3. Whether or not to update the geo database automatically or not
      4. starting the webserver and processors after the upgrade process

That’s it! You’re done. You can now navigate to the web interface, log in using your old admin password and activate your Urchin 7 license. Notice how I said use your “old admin password”? At the end of the upgrade process, the installer tells you to log in using admin with the default password. However, this is wrong. The password is still set to your existing admin password.

During the upgrade process, the only other issues I ran into were two odd error messages.

• ## Warning: The following configuration file is not the same as the
  distributed version. Please check this file to make sure it contains
  the correct options: /usr/local/urchin/etc/urchin.conf
• ## Warning: The following configuration file is not the same as the
  distributed version. Please check this file to make sure it contains
  the correct options: /usr/local/urchin/var/urchinwebd.conf.template

What’s odd about them were that those two files were default out-of-the-box Urchin 6 files. So I’m not too sure what the issue was. No matter though, everything worked fine after the upgrade. Here’s a screenshot of the new interface

Come back for the next instalment – “7 Days of Urchin 7: Day 3 – Performance”