Upgrading Alkaline

Finding the Current Software Version

To find the current version of Alkaline, run the asearch binary with no parameters. The header includes the exact version of your currently running software. If the version is not present in the header, you are running Alkaline 1.1 or earlier.

On Windows, you can select the asearch.exe program in the File Explorer and choose the Version tab on the Properties sheet. This provides, among others, the exact version of your program. If the Version property sheet is not present, you are running Alkaline 1.3 or earlier.

With Alkaline 1.4 and above, the Administration pages show the product version in the Performance Counters section.

Before You Begin

Backup your entire Alkaline installation. Make sure that if for whatever reason the upgrade process fails, you can revert to the previous configuration. This involves copying the entire directory containing the Alkaline binary or executable, the indexes and the admin directory if any.

Upgrading to Version 1.7

Alkaline 1.7 fixes several bugs related to the usage of the GET method. It is necessary to modify search templates and custom scripts to reflect the following changes:

• start and quant parameters are passed as name=value pairs, such as start=10 rather than start10

• options on the query string are separated with & and not +, the later now equivalent to a space

Upgrading from Version 1.4 and Above

Download the version of Alkaline you wish to upgrade to from http://alkaline.vestris.com/ . Uncompress the contents of the distribution into a temporary directory.

Stop the Alkaline service as usual. Please refer to the Stopping Alkaline FAQ for details on various methods of shutting down the service.

Replace your current installation asearch binary and admin directory with those from the new distribution. There should be no additional permissions or settings to apply.

Restart the service or daemon. Follow the same procedure as you usually use. Test that all your regular operations work properly.

Upgrading from Earlier Releases

First, check whether you have an equiv directory in your folder where Alkaline is installed. If you don't, follow the instructions for versions 1.4 and above.

Although new versions of Alkaline are backward compatible to the equiv structure format, it is recommended that you follow the procedure described below as the equiv structures are deprecated.

Download the version of Alkaline you wish to upgrade to from http://alkaline.vestris.com/ . Uncompress the contents of the distribution into a temporary directory.

Stop the Alkaline service as usual. Please refer to the Stopping Alkaline FAQ for details on various methods of shutting down the service.

Replace your current installation asearch binary and copy admin directory from the new distribution. There should be no additional permissions or settings to apply.

Examine your equiv/equiv.struct file. For each group or alias that is searchable (the first parameter in the url query for search), make sure you already have a subdirectory at the current level. For example, if your search query was http://server:9999/?Foo+FooHTML , you probably have a directory foo .

For all HTML aliases in the equiv/equiv.struct file, create a .aln or an html file under the alias subdirectory. For example, if your search query was http://server:9999/?Foo+FooHTML, and FooHTML is an alias for a remote url, such as http://server/alkaline/search.html , create foo/search.aln with a single line of contents, http://server/alkaline/search.html . If the alias was pointing to a local file, copy that local file under the alias subdirectory. For example, if FooHTML was an alias for /home/www/search.html , copy this file to foo/search.html .

Examine other options in the equiv/equiv.struct file. They include Proxy and other options. Create a global.cnf file in the current directory and populate it with equivalents. For example, Proxy,proxy.server.com:8080 becomes an entry in a simple text file, global.cnf, as Proxy=proxy.server.com:8080 . Global.cnf options and parameters are detailed in Appendix II: Known global.cnf Variables .

Passwords are scrambled in equiv/admin.struct. You must create new passwords in the global.cnf file. Typically, add the root password. For example, add Pass root=test in your global.cnf file.

Replace the search queries in your search templates and throughout your site. For example, if your search query was http://server:9999/?Foo+FooHTML , it becomes http://server:9999/foo/search.html or http://server:9999/foo/search.aln .

Delete the equiv subdirectory.

Restart the service or daemon. To start the daemon now, you need to specify subdirectories rather than aliases. For example, ./asearch 9999 foo bar . Test that all your regular operations work properly.