Interspire Shopping Cart (ISC) is one of the best self-hosted e-commerce system in the market. It has most of the features that you will ever need. Another big plus with ISC is it is still actively developed. Interspire regularly releases minor updates every few months to fix some bugs and a major one in 6-12 months.
One inconvenient thing that might prevent you to do an update immediately is it cannot auto-update (WordPress style), so you need to manually reupload the necessary files. Official documentation from Interspire to upgrade your ISC installation can be found here.
Following the instructions there is the safest method for sure. But if you do not have the super fast connection via FTP to your server, overwriting the files one by one might take at least a few hours. So I tried to find with a faster way with the help of SSH. Let’s start.
Preparation
Make sure you have done the followings:
- Backup your store’s database and files.
- Read the changelog.txt file from the latest update to know which template files that need to be updated.
- If you changed or customized the system files, you might want to reprogrammed some of the files first.
Step 1: Rename your current ISC folder
By default, the store folder is named ‘shoppingcart’. You can rename it to ‘shoppingcart-old’. If it is on your root folder, you can create a new folder and move everything there.
Step 2: Upload and unzip the update file
You can use FTP to do this. Then using SSH, unzip the file:
unzip Interspire_Shopping_Cart_(Edition)-5.x.x.zip
The folder can be renamed after unzipped.
Step 3: Copy product images folder
This folder contains all the product images that you have uploaded, so it is very important to keep it intact. First you need to rename the ‘product_images’ folder from the new system folder. Then go to your old store folder and copy the ‘product_images’ folder:
cp -r product_images ../shoppingcart/
Step 4: Copy the template folder (if you use custom theme)
Go to ‘templates’ subfolder, find your custom template name:
cp -r CustomThemeFolder ../../shoppingcart/templates/
Step 5: Finalize the upgrade
From here, ISC upgrade script will take care of the rest. Just open your ISC admin URL, then it will do the database upgrade and all necessary steps.
Done.