Updating advice from 17.1 (non docker) on Debian to latest docker version

[lixper]

Hello,
we are using egroupware 17.1 on a Debian 10 linux i386 system with postgresql 11. We mainly use the agenda (with xmlrpc), the knowledge base, the multi language web site, and seldomly, the email interface. Please note that that system was still using Debian 9 and postgresql 9.6 until a month ago, but we plan to update to Debian 11 in a short while. The apache web site host many web sites, including the egroupware one.

The installation has been made using the opensuse hosted repository with all EPL packages.

We would like to update this installation to a more recent software version, preferably the latest one. We found that nowadays egroupware runs on docker, that it may still use apache2, that it still support postgresql 11, we found that new installations include mariaDB but may still be manually completed using postgresql, we found that postgresql 12 and later isn’t supported yet. We finally found that egroupware is only shipped for amd64 architecture, while we have an i386 one; we may enable multi architecutre on Debian, will this work?

We did not find any documentation about how to update in this scenario. Does the docker installation (simply running apt) migrates all our data into the new image? Otherwise, is there a way to load in a new installation, all our current data? Does the multilanguage web site application still work on the new egroupware?

Thank you,
Giuseppe

[RalfBecker]

Hi Guiseppe,

all you found out is true

We finally found that egroupware is only shipped for amd64 architecture, while we have an i386 one; we may enable multi architecutre on Debian, will this work?

I have no idea, I thought i386 architecture is dead by now …

We did not find any documentation about how to update in this scenario. Does the docker installation (simply running apt) migrates all our data into the new image? Otherwise, is there a way to load in a new installation, all our current data?

In principle it does, thought I never tested it with PostgreSQL. You probably need to change db_host in your header.inc.php to something else then localhost, eg. the IP address of your server or the docker0 address (172.17.0.1) AND change permissions to allow access from the EGroupware container probably in 172.18.0.0/16, docker ps shows it).

An other option is to make a DB backup inside EGroupware and simply restore it back on the MariaDB in the container, as our DB backup is not DB-type specific. To do so you should make the backup BEFORE the update, AND then delete the header.inc.php to force a new installation. File are kept in /var/lib/egroupware on the host system anyway, so you will find your backup afterwards in the usual backup-directory ready to restore.

Does the multilanguage web site application still work on the new egroupware?

It still does with the current 21.1, it will no longer work with the next version 22.1, as it will use PHP 8.1 by default, which SiteMgr does NOT work with. So you probably want to start looking for some replacement for it in future. Our multilingual website uses Wordpress with some plugin for the multilingual stuff.

Ralf

[lixper]

Thank you for your prompt reply. This is an old installation, done at least 6 years ago on an i386 machine. Several years ago we moved the disks from the orignal machine to a new one, with a 64 bits CPU, but the system has never been reinstalled.
I’ll try to activate the multi architecture. I’ll keep you posted.