Using SVN

What is SVN?

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system that allows users to download the very latest version of Observium without having to wait for someone to get around to packaging it. Advantages to using Subversion include the latest version, vastly simplified updating, the ability to roll back an upgrade and the ability to easily create and submit patches.

See Subversion on Wikipedia for more details; below are some quick directions for a couple of common tasks.

Why use SVN?

We use SVN as an automatic update mechanism in order to rapidly deliver improvements and fixes to users without the hassle of traditional packaged updates.

The SVN repository is not "unstable" or of lower quality than the .tar.gz releases were, it's just much easier for us to manage and for our users to update. There will be no more .tar.gz releases in future, so you must use SVN.

Using Subversion to download Observium

Prerequisites

You must have a Subversion client installed before you can use it. (Although you can theoretically download files without Subversion, this would mean tediously downloading each individual file manually.) The recommended software is the official Subversion client, available from the Subversion project page. Note that this client uses a command-line interface, which the instructions below use. Alternatively, you can get subversioning software with a graphical user interface such as TortoiseSVN.

Download

To download from the latest Observium SVN revision (recommended), enter the following command from the command-line in the directory you wish to download to:

svn checkout http://www.observium.org/svn/observer/trunk/ observium

More instructions can be found at Ubuntu SVN Installation.

Upgrading to the very latest version

Upgrading between releases with SVN is simple. If you have direct access to the command-line on the server, you can enter the commands below directly; alternatively, you can maintain a copy on a local machine and upload updated versions to the server.

To upgrade Observium, simply use the command below in the root of the installation directory.

svn update

To ensure that your database is kept up to date, you must run discovery.php immediately after an SVN update.

./discovery.php -h none

Upgrading to a specific release of Observium

If you don't want to run the latest version, you can choose to stick to our "stable" svn revision. This is the last known-good revision without any data-affecting bugs. The latest "stable" revision is posted on the front page of the web site, and can be automatically retrieved from http://www.observium.org/stable.php.

You can upgrade to a specific revision with the following command:

svn update -r ''revision number''

Let's say you want to install/upgrade version 0.12.4.3049. The SVN revision is the last number, so run the following:

svn update -r 3049

Running an 'older' version

It may very well be possible something is broken in an official release and was fixed in the development version. We can not oversee all code changes and impact they may have to any of your devices, so we can not accept bug reports for non-very-latest versions. If you find a bug, try the latest version and if it's still broken, contact us. If it's not broken any longer, well, excellent!