Installing and upgrading help

I used to dread that e-mail. You know the one:

"A newer version of Moodle is available"

My day job nowadays is teaching, but I am an IT veteran of over 20 years and I maintain three Moodle instances on my own VPS. All those instances, each with dozens of plugins loaded; upgrading can be a real bind. Leaving things be is no longer an option, as those updates include lots of security fixes.

So, I wrote a BASH script to automate the whole process. That grew and branched. I added database backups and a lot of other goodies. I generalised the solution with config entries. Now I have decided to post the code online - hence GEMMA is born - GEMMA Eases Multi-instance Moodle Admin.

The scripts work on a LAMP server (sorry Windoze) to give you a single command that downloads the upgrade, puts the instance in maintenance mode, backs up the files, backs up the database, extracts the new version, reinstates your config, installs any custom assets (e.g. favicon.ico), upgrades the database and returns you to live mode. A second command then allows you to upgrade ALL of your out of date plugins in one go.

Please let me know what you think. CAVEAT - this is ALPHA release software. Use at your own peril!