## Index → Getting started

## Upgrading Cherokee

If there is a prepackaged version of Cherokee for you platform of choice, we strongly encourage you to use it. Although upgrading Cherokee is not complicated, the prepackaged versions should make your upgrades much easier.

Refer to the APT section of the Unix installation instructions if you are using Debian or Ubuntu for some additional information.

The current mechanism of choice to configure Cherokee did not exist prior to release 0.6. A lot has happened since then, and Cherokee has been constantly improving in terms of stability, efficiency and features.

If you happen to be running an old version of Cherokee and would like to keep your current configuration settings, you can upgrade your cherokee.conf file.

Cherokee now supports configuration versioning, so from now on, whenever a change is made to the configuration file format, Cherokee-Admin will be able to automatically convert yours to the new release. You simply have to load Cherokee-Admin and it will be converted once you proceed to saving it.

There is also a command line utility that you can use to do the exact same thing. It is provided under `$prefix/share/cherokee/admin/upgrade_config.py.`

In case you need to do this manually, the usage is as follows:

      /usr/share/cherokee/admin/upgrade_config.py /etc/cherokee/cherokee.conf

If Cherokee-Admin can not make the conversion automatically (because it is older than the configuration versioning feature), you still have options.

You can attempt to upgrade you configuration file by manually running the Python scripts provided under `contrib`.

The usage is quite simple, and works the same way for all the scripts:

        cp /etc/cherokee/cherokee.conf /etc/cherokee/cherokee.conf-0.99.9
        contrib/0999to09910.py /etc/cherokee/cherokee.conf-0.99.9 /etc/cherokee/cherokee.conf

If you need to upgrade from a really old release, simply apply the whole chain of conversions.

Note that some of the available prepackaged versions of Cherokee are set to offer the possibility of automatically running these scripts to upgrade the configuration if files from a prior release are detected in the system.

Every effort is made to bulletproof the upgrade scripts. If any of them does not work for you, please send a bug report. However, Cherokee is a very active project and has been steadily advancing and incorporating technical improvements. You should really be using cherokee-admin to configure your system if you want to take full advantage of the new features. Even if the upgrade process is successful, you should use the new configuration file as a start point and go through the normal configuration process using cherokee-admin.