Update Piwik

This page explains how to update Piwik.

There are two main methods:

The One-Click Update
The Manual Update

1. The One-Click Piwik Update

You can use the one-click upgrade and update your Piwik in 10 seconds – in just one click of a button!

Step 1: Set Write Permissions on the Piwik folder with FTP

To carry out the one-click update, the Piwik folder needs to have the correct permissions on your web server, to allow Piwik to download the file, extract Piwik and overwrite the existing files.

Please give write permission via your FTP software (for example, 0644 or 0777) to your piwik root folder. Once the one click update is finished, you can restore normal read only permissions to the piwik folder.

FTP permissions in Filezilla

Click on the Alert Box in Piwik

When you use Piwik, the info box looks like this:

When a new version of Piwik is available, you'll be alerted in this box.

Once a new Piwik version is released, the message may take up to 8 hours to appear in the alert box.

Read the Message and Click Update Automatically

Watch the magic!

Treat Yourself

Your Piwik is now updated! Why not share your experience with others by writing a blog post, or spend some time doing new analysis on the Piwik numbers? Have you tried looking at your top websites referrers or sorted by decreasing bounce rate?

Or simply sit back for a few moments and enjoy the beauty of life!

2: The Manual Three-Step Update

If for some reason the one-click update doesn't work for you, you can still update Piwik using FTP.

1) Back up your Configuration File

Please back up your Piwik configuration file. You can find this at: config/config.ini.php
This file contains the details for your existing installation, e.g. your database sign-in information and list of enabled plugins.

2) Replace the Piwik files and Copy your Old Config File to the New Piwik

You can download the latest Piwik release from http://piwik.org/latest.zip. You can download and extract it to your computer, or, if you have shell access, download it directly to the server.

If you upload your files using FTP, please make sure all files are transferred in binary mode. The new files should overwrite all the old files with the same names, including the config/global.ini.php.

You can now restore your Piwik configuration file from your backup to the new config/config.ini.php

If you didn't backup your previous config.ini.php file, you can still reinstall Piwik and reuse your existing database without losing any data.

3) Update Piwik

Visit your Piwik installation in your web browser. If your new instance of Piwik requires changes to be made to the database, you will see this screen:

This will update your database so that it is compatible with the latest code.

Please be patient: database updates (for example adding a new index) can take a few minutes. Do not close your browser or click refresh during this process. If you fail to carry out this step correctly your Piwik installation may display incorrectly or not work at all.

Database Upgrade for High Traffic Piwik Servers

For high traffic websites, where the update process could take from a few minutes to a few hours, it is highly recommended that you run the database update process in the command line. You can trigger the Piwik update by calling in your shell

$ php /path/to/piwik/index.php -- "module=CoreUpdater"

For Medium and High traffic Piwik servers, we also recommend that you turn off Visitor Tracking & turn off the Piwik User Interface while you run the upgrade on the command line. This will ensure that the DB Schema updates are finished as soon as possible and without concurrent read/write errors.