Reinstall JoomlaWatch

JoomlaWatch is a great Joomla monitoring component and provides live statistics as to who is visiting your sites. This tool can be used with or without Google Analytics and in many ways I find it to be better than Google Analytics. My biggest problems to date with the component is that it is extremely difficult to upgrade and the documentation is lacking.
Several months back I had been running JoomlaWatch v1.2.6 and decided to update to the latest version at the time, v1.2.12. Looking on the JoomlaWatch component, I was unable to find an upgrade button. As such, I decided to download the latest version and attempt to install it through Joomla. This failed claiming that JoomlaWatch was already installed. Based on this information, I determined that an upgrade was not possible. Looking at the extracted JoomlaWatch zip file, I decided to read the upgrade.txt file. It said:

When you are doing an UPGRADE from some older version
====================================================
Uninstall from the admin backend #!ERASES!# all the database tables that belong
to JoomlaWatch. But, you can backup these tables with tools like phpMyAdmin, or some
database tools that comes with your webhosting. After the upgrade, you can restore them back.

So what tables do you need to backup, how do you back them up, and how do you get everything working after the upgrade?

1. Backup the tables individually – I used the following script (replace database_name with the name of the database hosting Joomla)

   for table in `mysql -B -N -u root -p -e "show tables" database_name | grep joomlawatch`; do mysqldump -u root -p database_name $table >>$table.sql; done

2. Uninstall all JoomlaWatch modules – You should have at least the agent, but may also have a visitors and users module
3. Uninstall JoomlaWatch component
4. Install new JoomlaWatch component
5. Install new JoomalWatch modules – You must install at least the agent module
6. Restore old Joomlawatch table – I used the following script (replace database_name with the name of the database hosting Joomla)

   for table in `ls | awk '{print $1}'`; do mysql -B -N -u root -p database_name < $table; done

7. Go to the JoomlaWatch component and accept the license
8. Configure the JoomlaWatch component as applicable
9. Enable the JoomlaWatch agent module

NOTE: version 1.2.12 adds a configuration option in the JoomlaWatch component so if JoomlaWatch is uninstalled the tables are not dropped. I would highly recommend enabling this feature!

© 2013, Steve Flanders. All rights reserved.