What's the general process for upgrading to 1.7.9?

Before I begin, yes I know using dev builds is bad. I've been using them for years though and am prepared to deal with any consequences that may happen because of it.

So I downloaded a 1.7.9 dev build the other day, ran it, and then all of my players lost their inventory and position. Then I found out that this is the first version that used UUID's. I reverted to backup and everything was fine. The question is, how do I go about updating? Do I need to update every single plugin that relies on player names or is there a "bridge" plugin somewhere that adds an abstraction layer to Bukkit?

Thanks in advance.

 

1. Make a full backup.
2. Check each of your plugins and update the ones with newer versions. Also note that some of the BukkitDev plugin pages don't have the proper builds noted, so you may have to check the change logs to see what release each version is intended for.
3. Get the most recent version of CraftBukkit.
4. Start your server and wait for it to convert the data.
5. Wait, wait, wait, for it to convert the data. There will be exceptions generated. Don't panic! You may have to wait several minutes on large servers.
6. Are you sure you waited long enough?
7. After it appears the server has started, STOP the server, otherwise things won't be working right.
8. Restart the server. Check that everything is working.

Step #1 is the most important. Don't skip it. And don't forget to stop the server in #7 before testing stuff.

Old plugins (name-based instead of UUIDs) will work with 1.7.9, at least for now. But there are plugins which must be updated to work with 1.7.9.

 

Good in detail tutorial! 1+

 

Didn't work. That's pretty much what I did last time except for step 7. Same thing happened, I logged in and I spawned at spawn with a noobkit and nothing else. Maybe I should update Essentials to a dev build, what do you think? Essentials handles noob kits.

 

You have an online server and you were connected to the Internet when you did this, right? Are you running Essentials 2.13.1?

If it said, "Welcome to the server", I think that's a problem with your player data in your world file not being converted, not the Essentials player data. Checkout world\players to see if the data looks like it was converted.

 

LEOcab After the conversion, can you give some examples of the player .dat files that exist?

 

I got it to work, finally. I got a new job so I haven't been able to retry until now. Turns out the problem I was having only happens with me. My player file was the only one being left over for some reason, I tried it now and everyone else joined just fine. Weird. Oh well, thanks guys!