Mike Brawley Exploring the World!

How to patch MediaWiki to the latest release

You can only patch MediaWiki inbetween sub versions.  You cannot patch between main releases.   Download the latest patch from www.mediawiki.org.   In this example I am going to patch from 1.17.1 to 1.17.2.

Download page.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2012-January/000106.html

The file you need to download is the one under.
Patch to previous version (1.17.1), without interface text: http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.17/mediawiki-1.17.2.patch.gz
Copy the file to the root of the wiki directory on your server.  This is usually not the actual root, its usually /w

Unzip patch & store it in wiki web dir.

gunzip mediawiki-1.17.2.patch.gz

You can also unzip the mediawiki-1.17.2.patch.gz file on your local computer using 7-Zip and then copy the  mediawiki-1.17.2.patch file to the MediaWiki directory on your website.

Apply the patch

cd /var/www/html/
patch -i mediawiki-1.17.2.patch -p 1

Remove patch file.

rm -rf mediawiki-1.17.2.patch 

verify version

http://webserver/wiki/index.php/Special:Version