The application is able to update itself on most servers through its Update feature. Clicking on the Update button in the main page will take you to a new page where you can see your version status. If there is a new version available you will see something like this:
An update is available
Whereas when your version of the application is up-to-date your page will look something like this:
Up-to-date
The update information is cached for 6 hours, to prevent unnecessary slow down by the application constantly checking for updates. If you know there is an update available but it doesn't show you might want to click on the button. This will invalidate the update cache and force the application to check for updates immediately.
If you are not receiving update information please contact your host and ask them to open TCP/IP communications to www.akeeba.com and cdn.akeeba.com over ports 80 and 443 on their firewall. Please note that cdn.akeeba.com is served through a CDN which means that its IP has to be determined by your host by running traceroute from your server. We cannot provide a known IP for it. They have to also make sure that either the PHP cURL extension is available and enabled or that the URL fopen wrappers are enabled, i.e. allow_url_fopen=1 in their server's php.ini file. In both cases OpenSSL support has to be compiled in. Most servers fulfil all these criteria.
If an update is available, clicking on the button will begin the download of the update package and proceed to its installation. If for any reason this fails, you can still update automatically. Click on the Direct download URL to download the update ZIP file on your computer. Then extract it by double clicking on it. Upload the extracted files on your server, overwriting the existing application files. Finally, just go back to the application's main page. The application will perform any necessary post-update functions automatically.
You can also get more information about the update from the update page itself. Clicking on the Release notes link will open a popup with the release notes for the latest version. This typically contains important information you should be aware of before updating, a summary of changes and the complete change log since the last published release. Clicking on the Read more link will take you to our site's download page where you can find all the information and files of the latest version.