Starting with XWiki 4.2, the Distribution Wizard (also known as DW) was introduced as an experimental feature which helps users migrate their XWiki instances to newer versions without having to manually import the XAR (wiki pages) corresponding to their new version.

XWiki's Distribution Wizard comes as an aid to ease the migration and installation of the desired user interface (UI, the default set of wiki pages) in your flavour. It works using XWiki's Extension Manager to automatically detect your XWiki version to search, resolve, download and install the UI corresponding to your version. It requires an internet conection in order to work.

Clean Install

After putting your XWiki WAR inside your Servlet Container (Tomcat, Jetty, etc.) you start XWiki. When XWiki is first accessed, it will trigger the Distribution Wizard.

Welcome Step

Upon first access, you will be greeted by the Distribution Wizard, offering you the 3 possible options:

• Continue - when choosing this option, you will move to the next step of the Distribution Wizard
• Skip - DW will prompt you again after XWiki is restarted. This option is available from all the steps within DW.
• Cancel - Cancels the DW and you will have to manually import the XAR. This option is available from all the steps within DW.

User Interface

The first step will check your XWiki version and will propose a version of the UI which is suited for your version.

• Click on Install to install the proposed UI. This will resolve the extensions that are going to be installed.

  

• Click on the Continue button. This will start the actual installation of the previously resolved extensions.

  

• You will be prompted to insert credentials for the Administrator, which are Admin/admin.

  

• After the instalation is complete, you can click on the Continue button to proceed to the next step.
• Since this is a clean install, steps 2 and 3 are skipped.

Report step

The last step display all changes brought to the wiki.

Upgrade

Distribution Wizard also allows you to perform an upgrade without having to manually import the XAR file.

User Interface

• The Distribution Wizard detects that the UI version is not the latest and proposes to upgrade. Click on the Upgrade button.

  

• After resolving the required dependencies, click Continue button to begin the actual instalation of the new UI

  

• During the instalation you might get merge conflicts. Althrough XWiki does automatically a 3 way merge, sometimes the merge might fail. Solve your conflict and click on Continue

  

Wikis

Distribution Wizard list all the existing wikis with the recommended user interface version that needs to be installed in order to update the default set of wiki pages.

Extensions

In the last step you can upgrade the extensions that you may have installed on your wikis. As you can see in the image below there are two categories of extensions listed:

• invalid: they don't work with the current XWiki version so they must be upgraded
• outdated: they should work with the current XWiki version but there is a newer version available that probably has bug fixes, improvements or new features

Under each category, the extensions are grouped by the namespace (wiki) where they are installed. In order to complete this step you have to upgrade the invalid extensions. Upgrading the outdated extensions is optional as you can do it later from the Extension Updater section in the administration.