Reinstall or upgrade Ancestris

There are several situations where you may need to reinstall Ancestris, but they all end up following the same steps described below.

Situations justifying reinstallation

Reinstalling Ancestris on the same computer

• If a new stable version of Ancestris has just been released and you want to benefit from it.
• If there was a major modification of the same version, usually the daily version. For instance, when the Ancestris team makes changes to the Ancestris platform, they will ask you to reinstall. To be notified of such changes, you will need to subscribe to the discussion list.
• If a change has happened to your computer, or if some Ancestris files are lost. In this situation, Ancestris might no longer work properly.

In all those situations, your action will result in reinstalling Ancestris.

When reinstalling Ancestris, you will automatically be able to preserve your customizations.

It is up to you to decide if you want to reinstall Ancestris at the same location on your computer or not.
In either case, we recommend you to get rid of the former Ancestris instance and replace the Software files.
In case you were to keep two different instances of Ancestris on the same computer, Ancestris might get confused as there is only one set of user settings.

Installing Ancestris on a second computer

If you are to install Ancestris on a second computer, just proceed as a regular first-time installation.

If you want to have the same user settings on both computers, you should first copy the user settings folder from one computer to the other one.

Alternatively, you can also use the export button of the Ancestris preferences window.

Reinstalling the stable version

To reinstall the main version, while preserving your user settings, just proceed as a regular first-time installation.

It should be much quicker as Java should already be installed and your Ancestris launcher is already set.

In practice, it will consist of simply replacing the 5 folders listed in the following steps.

Reinstalling the daily version

To upgrade from the stable version to the daily version, or reinstall the daily version, follow the instructions below.

You have two possibilities:

• Either erase the previous application and re-install the new one (the preferred choice).
• Or replace the existing files with the new ones, which lets you keep the launcher that you might have set up (the preferred choice for Linux and Windows).

In the first situation, erase the previous Ancestris application and reinstall the new one.

In the second situation, follow the steps below:

• Quit Ancestris, if it is running
• Download the daily version from the Ancestris web site and install it as per the initial installation.
• In case you need to replace the files manually, go to the ancestris folder of the previous installation and delete the following 5 folders
  • ancestris
  • bin
  • etc
  • harness
  • platform
• Replace them with the recently downloaded corresponding 5 folders included in the package or the compressed archive.
• Restart Ancestris as usual

In case some settings no longer work, or are not compatible with the new version, please refer to the User settings page if you want to manage them yourself.

When a new stable version is released and you use the daily version, we recommend that you reinstall the daily version and clean some technical directories in the user directory. See here.

Troubleshooting

In case the newly installed application does not launch or generates an exception (ClassNotFound, etc) or shows the wrong version number, the installation process probably went wrong or there is a conflict with the previous version or that you simply refreshed the daily version using the update menu in the application instead of downloading the new version from the Ancestris web site.

In this case, please uninstall and reinstall with a clean set of files and user settings.

• Uninstall the current version already installed
  • Delete the application directory
• Erase the following folders from the user directrory
  • .ancestris/trunk/var/cache
  • .ancestris/trunk/modules
  • .ancestris/trunk/update_tracking
• Reinstall Ancestris using a new downloaded file from the Ancestris web site