Hey everyone, we have just branched off a release candidate branch for the next stable release of Friendica to focus on testing the code and fixing the final problem. For this to succeed, we’d like to ask you to test the 3.6-rc code on your node if you like.

This branch is for the final bug fixes and translation updates before the release. We don’t expect to heavy changes to it till the release. New features wont be included there. Instead pull requests for those should be done against the development branch as usual.

Before you update the code, please check that you have at least PHP 5.6 on your server available. Friendica does not work properly with version older then that.

How to switch to the RC branch?

If you are currently running the develop branch, then all you have to do is to checkout the 3.6-rc branch after a pull from the repositories.

git pull
git checkout 3.6-rc
cd addon
git pull
git checkout 3.6-rc

Assuming that you already have the composer call in your updating routing. In the last couple days there were no changes to the dependencies.

If you are currently using the last stable release code installed from git, the procedure is almost identical. There is one thing you should be aware of before doing the switch—we switched to composer for dependency management. If you don’t take this into account, your Friendica node will not work after the pull of the new code.

You can either add a call to

util/composer.phar install --no-dev

after the git pull in your update routines for the core repository, or you can add a small script to the “post-merge” git-hook. The script will then automatically be executed by git if there were changes to the dependencies.

Please be aware, that there were some heavy work on the database structure since the last stable release of Friendica. This means that depending on the size of your database, your node might need some time to apply all the changes. This can be several hours. The maintenance mode will inform you about the progress.

After you performed the update, you need to touch your cron job for the background process. The script handling the worker has been moved to scripts directory. So your cron job must now contain: something like

/usr/bin/php scripts/worker.php

instead of the old location in the include directory.

If you are updating from a very old version of Friendica, you have to first update to version 3.5.4 before you can update to the 3.6-rc branch.

Should you encounter any problems while testing the RC code, please let us know about in the Friendica support forum, at github or over any other of the support channels.

Thanks for testing and helping!

Solving Problems

DB Update stuck

One tester reported, that the update of the database got stuck at the item table for several hours. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script

scripts/dbstructure.php update

from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.