Upgrading to ME 1.25
Elentra ME 1.25 was released on April 4th, 2023.
Last updated
Elentra ME 1.25 was released on April 4th, 2023.
Last updated
Release 1.27 introduced breaking changes to EJS 2. If you are using a version of Elentra that is 1.26.0 or less, you need to update deploy.php to ensure "branch_ejs" is pointing to "v2.6.0"
Elentra ME 1.25 requires PHP 8, and uses Laravel 9.
Please review the section before proceeding.
From within Sourcetree on your developer workstation, open your existing local Elentra ME Branded Edition (i.e., uni-elentra-1x-me
) repository.
If you do not currently have a consortium
Git remote that points to the Consortium Edition elentra-1x-me
repository, then ensure that you add one:
Click the "Fetch" button (ensuring that "Fetch from all remotes" and "Prune tracking branches no longer present on remote(s)" options are checked) or type git fetch consortium
.
Checkout your Branded Edition staging branch (e.g., uni/staging
) and create a new branch based on this branch (e.g., uni/staging-pre-1240
) just for easy restore purposes in case it's needed. Once that branch has been created, checkout the original Branded Edition staging branch (e.g., uni/staging
) and continue.
Within the "Remotes" section in Sourcetree sidebar, expand the consortium
remote, then right click on release/1.25
and click Pull consortium/release/1.25 into uni/staging
. Alternatively, pull the latest stable release tag, e.g. v1.25.2
.
At this point, you may be asked to resolve any merge conflicts that have been created by making modifications to your Branded Edition that conflict with changes that have been made to the Consortium Edition. Depending on your level of conflict, this could be as simple as a minor modification to the composer.lock
file or something much more complex. If you require assistance, please book an appointment with the Elentra Consortium Core Team, or chat with us on Slack in the #developers channel and we will provide you with guidance or assistance on moving forward.
Generally speaking, we always recommend that Consortium Participants follow the best practices defined in our documentation, which may help reduce the number of conflicts that you encounter.
Once the merge conflicts have been resolved, commit the merge to your uni/staging
branch and continue to Part 2 of the instructions.
We recommend against pushing your changes to your origin
remote at this point. Please wait until Part 2 has been completed and you have finished some initial testing on your local developer environment.
Release branches (e.g. release/1.25
) usually only get bug fixes and have low potential risk, but issues may not be identified until our integration testing before the next release. Therefore, release branches are not completely stable. Release tags (e.g. v1.25.2
), on the other hand, are NEVER actively worked on and are the official minor release for a given major release, because tags are only created from the release/1.x branches AFTER our integration testing has passed.
Click the "Fetch" button (ensuring that "Fetch from all remotes" and "Prune tracking branches no longer present on remote(s)" options are checked) or type git fetch consortium
.
Resolve any merge conflicts and commit the changes to the master
branch of your Branded Edition Elentra API. Push these changes to your origin
remote.
Finally, ensure that within your new Deployer deployment recipe (deploy.php
) to set the enabled_branded_api
option to true
and the deployment script will take care of the rest during deployment.
During every major Elentra ME version upgrade, you are required to compare:
The stock settings.inc.php file with each environmental settings file in use.
The www-root/templates/default template directory with each Branded Edition customized template within the www-root/templates directory.
Failure to compare and update all environmental settings files and customized templates could result in a non-functional or semi-functional installation of Elentra ME. If you have questions or require assistance, please contact the Elentra Consortium Core Team.
Using a tool like Araxis Merge or Meld, compare the www-root/templates/default
directory with each Branded Edition customized template in the www-root/templates
directory (e.g., www-root/templates/uni
).
In most cases, you will want to add missing files, update your language files, examine each modification to the CSS files, and add any modifications to your header.tpl.php
files.
This process can take some time depending on the level of change in your implementation, and should be repeated for each template you have created.
Once you have compared your templates, commit the changes to your uni/staging
branch.
Now that you have upgraded your source code and updated your settings and templates. You should begin reviewing and testing the upgrade on your developer workstation. Before testing can begin we need to do a few things.
Log into your local elentra-developer
Docker container, and change to your uni-elentra-1x-me
directory:
Ensure that the latest Composer dependencies installed:
Ensure that the database migrations are completed:
At this point, providing you're satisfied with your local testing, we would recommend that you push your changes to your origin
remote.
The following transition instructions are to be used as reference-only, as there may be unique circumstances within your existing deployment recipe to be considered.
Open the Deployer deployment/deploy.php
deployment recipes in your editor. There are a few variables at the top of deploy.php
that need to be set. The following table describes variable names that must set.
Variable Name
Description
application
Application Name (e.g., uni-elentra-1x-me
)
packagist_token
Institutional Packagist.com Composer token
repository
Branded Edition Elentra ME Git repository location
branch
The default deployment branch (e.g., master
) within your Branded Edition Elentra ME Git repository. This value is always overridden by the host configuration section (if present), so it not overly important.
repository_ejs
Default recommended.
This can be left as-is unless you have a Branded Edition Elentra JS Git repository.
branch_ejs
Default recommended.
This can be left as-in unless you have a Branded Edition Elentra JS Git repository. This value is always overridden by the host configuration section (if present), so it not overly important.
enable_branded_api
Default value is false.
If you have a Branded Edition Elentra API with your implementation of Elentra then please set this to true
Once you have configured all of the variables correctly, the next step is to translate the hosts configuration. The following section illustrates a single staging server and multiple production server transition.
Step 3: Review Deployment Commands
The Deployer deployment strategy transition should require no Apache configuration changes and was designed to be fully backwards compatible with older Capistrano recipes.
Deployer
Capistrano
dep deploy staging
cap staging deploy
dep deploy production
cap production deploy
dep rollback staging
cap staging deploy:rollback
Providing that you have pushed the changes to your uni/staging
branch to your origin
remote, you can now deploy the upgrade to your staging environment from within your Docker container.
Log into your local elentra-developer
Docker container, and navigate to your deployment
directory:
Deploy changes to your staging server using the new Deployer deployment recipe:
Providing that you have thoroughly tested your upgraded Branded Edition implementation of Elentra ME on within your staging environment, it is safe to proceed with a production upgrade.
From within Sourcetree on your developer workstation, open your existing local Elentra ME Branded Edition (i.e., uni-elentra-1x-me
) repository.
Checkout your uni/production
branch.
Right click on your uni/staging
branch and click "Merge uni/staging into uni/production". This will merge all of the commits that have gone into creating the upgrade, into your uni/production
branch.
Push the commits in the uni/production
branch to your origin
remote. Log into your local elentra-developer
Docker container, and change to your deployment
directory:
Deploy changes to your production server using the new Deployer deployment recipe:
PHP 8.0
When you upgrade your version of PHP to 8.0, you will need to test your customizations to make sure they are compatible with PHP 8.0.
PHP 7.4 is no longer supported.
Laravel 9
This release upgrades the Laravel version used by the core code base from Laravel 6.x to 9.x.
In order to help upgrade your customizations to be compatible with Laravel 9.x, do the following:
Ensure that you are merging our updates to the composer.json, and that the composer.lock is updated as well.
If you have a branded API, update your customizations to make them compatible with Laravel 9.x.
The cost is about $30 CAD per version upgrade i.e. 6.x to 7.x, 7.x to 8.x, and 8.x to 9.x.
The service will generate pull requests to your branded API repository that will fix lines of code incompatible with the new version.
Test all of your customizations to ensure that they still work with Laravel 9.x.
Composer v1 is no longer supported. In elentra-1x-me/deployment/deploy.php
, change the follow line:
to:
i.e. change it from version=1.10.16
to version=2.6.2
.
To update your Branded Edition Elentra API, first clone or checkout the compatible version of your Branded Edition Elentra API to your local environment using a git tool like . To find the required version, please consult the .
Within the "Remotes" section in Sourcetree sidebar, expand the consortium
remote, then right click on the identified branch from step 1 (i.e. compatible version listed in ) and click Pull consortium/<branch> into <Deployed Branch>
. There may be merge conflicts that must be resolved if customizations made to your Branded Edition Elentra API.
Using Sourcetree, create a new tag that follows semantic versioning. For example at the time of writing, the latest tagged release of the api is v8.0.0
and the composer.json
provided with Elentra ME 1.25 specifies that the major version of API version must be ~8.0
. Create a new tag where the current date follows the patch version: 8.0.1.20230406
.
.
Using a tool like or , compare www-root/core/config/settings.inc.php
with each environmental settings file in the www-root/core/config
directory (e.g., settings-staging.inc.php
, settings-production.inc.php
).
When you compare the Consortium Edition settings.inc.php
file with your Branded Edition files, you are looking to add additional settings that have been added to the stock settings.inc.php
file and remove any settings that have been removed from the stock settings.inc.php
file. In most cases, your Branded Edition settings files should have the same lines (albeit potentially different settings values) as the Consortium Edition.
Once you have compared your settings files, commit the changes to your uni/staging
branch.
Providing these steps were successful, you should now be able to visit in your web browser and being your local upgrade review.
The full Elentra Deployment Tool documentation is available from within the section.
Copy the .deployignore
and deploy.php
files from the and place them in your ~/Sites/uni-elentra-1x-me/deployment
directory
For more documentation related to host configuration options, please see the , which is quite extensive.
The typical deployment commands used by institutions are referenced below, but please see the for a full list of all commands available.
Providing the deployment was successful, you should now be able to visit in your web browser to begin a thorough review of your upgraded Branded Edition implementation of Elentra ME.
Providing the deployment was successful, you should now be able to visit in your web browser and verify that you are now running the latest version of Elentra ME.
Backward Incompatible Changes in PHP 8.0:
To this end, it may be useful to purchase to to automatically update your API code base to be compatible.