[Koha] Upgrade procedure

[Tom Burke]

Hello the list

I am a new volunteer IT help for a small number of community libraries in Sheffield, UK. I have been tasked with researching what we need to do to upgrade our Koha installation, but so far have not been able to find any definitive guidance. (I may of course have been looking in the wrong place.) I’d welcome some advice from the list, please.

We have a server running Debian Buster on which we have installed Koha 19.11 Common. Then we have 5 actual instances configured, one each for each of the community libraries. We would like to upgrade from 19.11 to a later release. I’ve gained some experience in installing and configuring Koha to a basic degree on local test sites and would now like to test the upgrade procedure; however, I have been unable to find any documentation about the procedure to follow.

Among the questions I’ve got are:
	a) we assume that if we wanted to move from 19.11 to 20.11, we would have to do it in two stages, i.e. first to 20.05 and subsequently to 20.11 - is this a correct assumption?; and
	b) does the upgrade procedure amend the database schema, etc, for multiple instances that are using the same Koha Common installation?

My apologies if I’m asking in the wrong place, or if I‘ve simply missed some clear instructions on all this.

Tom Burke