At the beginning of the project, Koha project developers used sourceforge.net as their centralized repository for source code; in December 2005 the source code was moved to savannah.nongnu.org. Savannah's repositories use CVS (Concurrent Versions System), a tool used to manage changes within a source code tree.

Some in the Koha community have expressed interest in migrating Revision Management Systems (RMS) from CVS to a more distributed system like Arch. If project developers move all Koha development to an Arch model a different guide would be necessary, but for now, I can describe the basics of how to keep your Koha 2.2 system up-to-date using CVS and Savannah. At this time, this document does not discuss how to upgrade a system from an older version of Koha to a newer version.

In order to access a CVS repository, you must first install a CVS client (if one is not already installed on your system). General information about CVS client software (and it's use with sourceforge.net) can be found in the following SourceForge.net document: Basic Introduction to CVS and SourceForge.net (SF.net) Project CVS Services. Information more specific to Savannah can be found in the Savannah Frequently Asked Questions.

The checking out process is quite simple. Change your directory to the directory you have selected as the root directory for your CVS working copy (mine is /build) and type: cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.nongnu.org:/sources/koha co -r rel_2_2 koha

At this point you should see a long listing of all the files that are being checked out, and eventually it will finish and you will be back at the command line:

So now you have a new directory "koha" which contains the very latest files and bugfixes for that version of Koha. But this directory does not update your installed version of Koha. To do that you will need to link the installed directory tree to locations within the new directory you just created. One confusing element of this step is the fact that the CVS directory tree is quite different than the installation tree. This is because the organization of the documents after an installation doesn't make sense as the organization for developers to use while programming.

The first step you'll want to take is to backup your existing Koha directory tree. If you performed a default install of Koha without customizing your directory locations the following directories need to be backed up:

This is easily accomplished by using the mv command. For example, to backup the /usr/local/koha/intranet/cgi-bin directory, change directories to /usr/local/koha/intranet and issue:

If for some reason you are having trouble with the symlinking or you want to revert back to the default directories you can always use this backup to restore things (simply reverse the above command).

After backing up all of the above directories you'll be ready to create the symlinks. This is accomplished using the ln command with the -s option. For more info on ln, see the man page.

$KOHA_WORKING_DIR is where you "checked out" Koha, $KOHA_INSTALL_DIR is where you installed Koha (/usr/local/koha by default) Here are the symlink mappings we're going to create:

For example, to link the first directory listed above you would type the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Getopt::Long;

my %opt = ();
GetOptions(
    \%opt,
    qw/working_dir=s install_dir=s no-backup help/
) or die "\nHouston, we got a problem\n";

if (exists $opt{help}) {
    print <<FIN;

Create symbolic links between a Koha installation and a Koha CVS working
directory.

Usage: koha_symlinks.pl --install_dir=<installation directory>
                        --working_dir=<working directory>
                        [--no-backup]
                        [--help]

--install_dir: is the directory where Koha is installed. By default,
  /usr/local/koha

--working_dir: where you checked out Koha. No default.

--no-backup: you really don't want to backup your installation directory

--help: show this help

FIN

      exit(0);
}

$opt{install_dir} = exists $opt{install_dir}
    ? $opt{install_dir}
    : '/usr/local/koha';

# Configurable Variables
foreach my $option (qw/working_dir install_dir/) {
  if (not exists $opt{$option}) {
    die 'option "', $option, '" is mandatory', "\n";
  }

  if (not -d $opt{$option}) {
    die '"', $opt{$option}, '" must be an existing directory', "\n";
  }

  if (not $opt{$option} =~ m{^/}) {
    die '--', $option, ' must be an absolute path', "\n";
  }
}

unless (exists $opt{'no-backup'}) {
    my @directories = (
        'intranet/cgi-bin',
        'intranet/htdocs/intranet-tmpl',
        'intranet/modules/C4',
        'opac/cgi-bin',
        'opac/htdocs',
    );

    foreach my $directory (map {$opt{install_dir}.'/'.$_} @directories) {
        system(
            'mv',
            $directory,
            $directory.'.bak'
        );
    }
}

system(
    'ln',
    '-s',
    $opt{working_dir},
    $opt{install_dir}.'/intranet/cgi-bin'
);

system(
    'ln',
    '-s',
    $opt{working_dir}.'/koha-tmpl/intranet-tmpl',
    $opt{install_dir}.'/intranet/htdocs/intranet-tmpl'
);

system(
    'ln',
    '-s',
    $opt{working_dir}.'/C4',
    $opt{install_dir}.'/intranet/modules/C4'
);

system(
    'ln',
    '-s',
    $opt{working_dir}.'/opac',
    $opt{install_dir}.'/opac/cgi-bin'
);

system(
    'ln',
    '-s',
    $opt{working_dir}.'/koha-tmpl/opac-tmpl',
    $opt{install_dir}.'/opac/htdocs'
);

Depending on your settings you may need to add the following line to both your intranet and opac virtual hosts configuration section of your httpd.conf or /etc/koha-httpd.conf file:

This ensures that Apache will allow connections to symlinked directories.

The next step in updating your Koha installation is to update your database. Over time, when bugs are fixed or when new features are added, the Koha database is subject to change. The updatedatbase script will modify your database to the latest version. It's located in the koha/updater directory of the CVS working copy. It is strongly recommended that you backup your database before running the updatedatabase script. For more information on how to backup your system see that section in the Koha documentation.

In order to run this script you may need to export the environment variable so that Perl knows where Context.pm is. You can do this by running:

or the path to your modules (usually /usr/local/koha/intranet/modules). Alternatively you can simply specify the path while executing the script:

You may see some messages that look like this: