Reminder needed: How to update to latest version of River5

[Anton Zuiker]

Hi, all.

Next week, I'll be presenting the Duke River (http://dukeriver.co or http://river5.dukeriver.co) to a professional development conference of the AAMC (med school association). I'm excited to show off the work, and to talk about the river of news concept and River5 (along with Little Outliner and Radio3).

But I'm not running the latest version of River5, and I'd like to so I can use the new home page tabs feature.

I reviewed the River5 install instructions at https://github.com/scripting/river5 and I've searched the River5 and River4 groups for keywords update, latest, upgrade but I can't seem to find tips on how to update to the latest version.

Do I replace the folder and reinstall with node, then copy over my backup config and list and river files, then start river5.js?

Thanks for any help you can give this poet.

Anton

[Dave Winer]

I've been doing this a lot lately -- 

I'll write a howto doc, and ask you to test that, so we'll have a new doc and it'll have been tested by a poet.

I'll do it first thing after coffee.

Dave

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Repo: https://github.com/scripting/river5
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[Dave Winer]

Anton, here's a draft of the howto.

https://github.com/scripting/river5/blob/master/docs/UPGRADE.md

Let me know if there are any problems.

Dave

[Anton Zuiker]

Testing this, and have gotten to instruction #6 to install but it looks like something has happened on my server to corrupt npm, as I get "npm: command not found" and in the bin I see forever and npm highlighted in black and red.

I tried to start or stop the node application as my host (Webfaction) suggests in a support doc, but that doesn't recognize the bin. So, I will file a ticket with my host to find out what went wrong.

Screenshot of my terminal attached.

[Anton Zuiker]

My problem seems to be that for Step #4, I overwrote the lib folder, which deleted the node_modules subfolder and the npm and forever modules. That meant step #6 didn't work for me. I'm working with my host to restore the npm module and will report back when I've been able to complete the River5 upgrade.

[Dave Winer]

I might understand what happened. 

When you deleted the node_modules folder, per step 5 (not 4), you deleted npm and forever because they were installed locally not globally.

You could probably get it all working by following the steps on this page.

https://github.com/scripting/river5/blob/master/docs/FORPOETS.md

And then copy in the data and lists folders from your original installation into the one you created. 

I'm guessing that NPM comes with the Node download. When you reinstall forever do it globally. 

npm install forever -g

The "-g" part means install globally. Which means it won't be in the node_modules folder in River5. Not a good place for it to be (as we just learned).

I will update the instructions for upgrading to not tell you to delete node_modules folder. It isn't really necessary, just designed to eliminate possible problems by doing a clean fresh install.

Sorry you had problems with this Anton. ;-(

Dave

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Repo: https://github.com/scripting/river5
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[Dave Winer]

I updated the docs to remove the step where you delete the node_modules folder.

https://github.com/scripting/river5/blob/master/docs/UPGRADE.md

Dave

[Anton Zuiker]

I have been able to get the updated Duke River running again, at http://dukeriver.co. It is running version v0.47f, which I believe is the latest.

Whew, and thanks! I'm so proud of this -- it's Dave's vision and hard work, but the fact I can muddle my way through ssh and ftp and node and more and get a visible river of news is very satisfying.

I end up searching for a lot of tips and answers. Dave's howTo and other docs are always the most clear. I appreciate the 'narrating your work' style.

A few notes:

- My host is Webfaction. To run river5 requires a node.js webapp. When first creating that webapp, Webfaction populates the folder structure with a bin as well as a lib/node_modules/npm folder. So my previous note about overwriting the npm folder at step 4 was accurate. fwiw, see screenshot of the current folder structure inside my webapp.

- I'm using the config.homePage setting for the tabs. Thank you for this feature! Just what I needed to be able to provide my Duke colleagues with rivers that more appropriately the institution, i.e. all the medical center feeds separate from the campus, events, athletics and other feeds.

- In trying to set the config.json file, I made a mistake I've made a few times before, i.e., allow the final item to end with a comma, e.g. "maxRiverItems": 300, } I've learned that that screws up river5.js. I caught my mistake today when I saw that starting river5.js showed it was using port 1337, which I knew wasn't the port identified in the config. Not sure you can do anything with this report. Just something I need to remember to watch for.

CONCLUSION: The new UPGRADE.md doc worked and is much appreciated.

[Dave Winer]

Anton -- 

1. I'm not familiar with Webfaction, the folder structure they create is foreign to me. I thought the "lib" folder was mine to do with as I please. Maybe it has a special meaning in Node-land that I'm not aware of. 

2. About JSON, yes, it is a strict format, and that's a good thing imho. You can test the validity of your JSON if you suspect it of being a problem using http://jsonlint.com. You can find other tools by searching for "json syntax checkers."

3. Thanks for the note about my docs. I put time into them, and organize the software so the docs work better, and try to learn from mistakes, and have been doing this for over 40 years, so there's that. ;-)

Dave

[Anton Zuiker]

Happy to report I easily and quickly updated to the latest version of River5 following the upgrade instructions.

[Dave Winer]

Thanks for the confirmation. It's always nice to know when things work! :-)

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Repo: https://github.com/scripting/river5
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