Upgrading an Existing VoyantServer

Migrating Data and Settings

You have an existing version of VoyantServer and you want to upgrade it. Usually this is very straightforward. Let's assume that you have downloaded the latest release and unzipped it in the same location as the "old" version that you're currently running:

VoyantSeverCurrentVersion
VoyantServerNewVersion

Assuming you used the defaults for the current version, you can copy (or move, but we'd suggest copying) the data directory from VoyantServerCurrentVersion to VoyantServerNewVersion – Voyant has built-in data migration feature for older versions. First will move the new data to a name that won't be recognized, then we'll copy (recursively) the old data to the new location.

mv  *VoyantServerNewVersion*/data *VoyantServerNewVersion*/data.bak
cp -r *VoyantServerCurrentVersion*/data *VoyantServerNewVersion*

Note that the directory names here need to be changed according to what you have, here's a more realistic version (but still probably not what you will need to do):

mv VoyantServer2_3/data VoyantServer2_3/data.bak
cp -r VoyantServer2_2/data VoyantServer2_3

Next we'll compare the old settings file to the new settings file to see if there's anything new or worth changing:

diff *VoyantServerNewVersion*/server-settings.txt *VoyantServerCurrentVersion*/server-settings.txt

If possible, keep the new settings file, but modify any of the settings you may have tweaked before. Usually you'd be fine overwriting the new settings file with the one you had before, but you may be missing out on new features and options.

That's it!

Externalizing Data and Settings

Note that it's also possible to use a location for your data that's external to the VoyantServer directory. The advantage of that is that when you upgrade, you don't need to modify the copy the data directory, you just need to set the location of the data directory in the settings file.