Installation

Moving files when transitioning servers

Moving files when transitioning servers

by Peter Garfield -
Number of replies: 2
Hi. We are moving (updating) servers and jumping several versions of WeBWorK in the process.

We're hoping to use some of our old courses as a basis for some of our new courses. Right now we do this by:
  1. Exporting the homework sets from the old course
  2. Archiving the entire (old) course via the File Manager, then
  3. Uploading this archive to the new course, again via the File Manager.
Is there a more efficient process that we can use? I would really like to save our administrator this work.

Thank you!
In reply to Peter Garfield

Re: Moving files when transitioning servers

by Michael Gage -
That seems about right. It's a bit quicker to archive the courses from the CourseAdministration page than to archive each one individually using the File Manager.

You can write scripts to do this -- but depending on the number of courses you have it might take more time to write and test these scripts. You might consult Gavin LaRose at U. of Michigan who I believe has written some scripts along these lines.

It's not absolutely necessary to do step 1, but I think it's a good practice
In reply to Peter Garfield

Re: Moving files when transitioning servers

by Danny Glin -
In my experience archiving courses in a previous version of WeBWorK and then unarchiving in a newer version often runs into problems, particularly if there have been database changes between the versions, but YMMV.

Another option is to do a mysqldump of your entire database and import this into the new server, and copy over the whole courses directory. This would port all of your existing courses, and you could then delete the ones you don't need. This might be less work for your system administrator, but possibly more work for your WeBWorK administrator.