Community Server on my mind

A less painful way to upgrade to a Service Pack

Have you not yet upgraded your Community Server sites to Community Server 2.1 SP 1, because it seems to be to much work, and you don't want it to go wrong and just haven't got the time right now to do I properly?

Service Packs are an important way to get security fixes, bug fixes, and more into an existing version of a product. Sometimes it can also contain fixes for better performance etc. And when it comes to web applications that are configurable in so many ways, it's not always an easy task. And if you have a well visited and lively site, you really don't want it to go wrong.

There are many ways to approach this to apply the Service Pack, or a version upgrade for that matter. There's an article on this blog from august this year that talks about how I do Community Server Upgrades. Ken Robertson wrote an article about the same time called "Deployments made easy".

In this article I thought I'd try to make a quick guide (light version) of one way to apply a Community Server 2.1 Service Pack.

1. First make the necessary backups of your webfiles and SQL DB
2. Download the webfiles to a local machine and put them in a temp folder. If you're hosting your site yourself, put the web files in a temp folder outside of your live web.
3. Download and unpack the Service Pack, and put it in a folder beside the temp folder from step 2.
4. Fire up WinMerge, or another file comparison application, and tell it to compare the folders in step 2 and 3 above.
   
5. If using WinMerge you can hide the files that are only in your temporary web site files and not in the Service Pack. That makes a lot easier to see just the files you need to change.
   
6. Go through all the folders in WinMerge and double click any files that report differences and merge any configurations from your web site files into the Service Pack files.
   
7. When all changes are done, upload the Service Pack files to your web. Alternatively do this on a temporary test server where you've set up a copy of your live site, to make sure everything is ok first.
8. Fire up SQL Server Management Studio Express (or similar) and connect to your SQL DB. Open the patch scripts and run them against your DB. Make sure Management Studio points to the right DB before you hit run (so it's not pointing to the Master DB). You might want to do this step on a test server first along with step 7, if you want to make really sure everything is ok before you modify your Live server.

You might question why I modify the Service Pack files with changes from the web files instead of the other way around in step 6 above. Of course you can do it the other way around, but I thought it would be better you just have to upload the changed files afterwards, than to upload the whole web again. Also there might be additional files within the service pack, not yet present on your web site.

Note, if you do like I do, you need another copy of the Service Pack files if you have other sites you need to upgrade. Don't use the ones you modified in step 6.

So go download the CS 2.1 SP1 (if you haven't already) and upgrade your site. There are some fixes and changes that you might benefit from. Alternatively have this information with you when it's time to upgrade to CS 2.1 SP2.