Technology Tales

Updating Piwik using the Linux Command Line

28th November 2016

Because updating Piwik using its web interface has proved tempestuous, I have decided update the self-hosted analytics application an ssh session. The production web servers that I use are hosted on Linux systems so that is why any commands apply to the Linux or UNIX command line only. What is needed for Windows servers may differ.

The first step is to down the required ZIP file with this command:

wget https://builds.piwik.org/piwik.zip

Once the download is complete, the contents of the ZIP archive are extracted into a new subfolder. This is a process that I carry out in a separate folder to that where the website files are kept before copying everything from the extract folder in there. Here is the unzip command and the -o switch turns on overwriting of any previously existing files:

unzip -o piwik.zip

Without the requirement folder in web server area updated, the next step is to do the actual system update that includes any updates to the Piwik database that you are using. There are two commands that you can use once you have specified the location of your Piwik installation. The second is needed when the first option cannot find where the PHP executable is stored. My systems had something more specific than these because both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 are installed. Looking in /usr/bin was enough to find what i needed to execute in place of php below. Otherwise, the command was the same.

./[path to piwik]/console core:update

php [path to piwik]/console core:update

While the upgrade is ongoing, it prompts you to permit it to continue before it goes and makes changes to the database. This did not take long on my systems but that depends on how much data there is. Once, the process has completed, you can delete any extraneous files using the rm command.