By default DokuWiki checks a special URL for messages once a day. This message system is used to notify administrators of DokuWiki installations about new releases and security warnings.

When the ACL is enabled, messages are displayed only to superusers. If ACL is disabled, all users can see the message.

The feature needs to contact update.dokuwiki.org on Port 80 - make sure your firewall allows this. If you don't want this feature, you can disable it with the updatecheck option in your config manager.

Each message has a unique ID shown in square brackets. Only messages which have a higher ID than the one configured in the global variable $updateVersion in ./doku.php will be displayed. When DokuWiki is upgraded to the release announced in the message, the doku.php file will be upgraded as well, suppressing the message. If you don't want to upgrade to an announced release you can simply increase the number in doku.php. (note: in older versions, this number was at the top of the file ./conf/msg).

When upgrading your installation, it might happen that DokuWiki continues to show the update message, even though the number in doku.php was increased by the upgrade. This is because DokuWiki caches already fetched messages for a day and will only refetch if the last modified timestamp of doku.php is higher than the one of the cache file. To stop the outdated update message from showing you can simply wait a day, touch¹⁾ the doku.php or delete the data/cache/messages.txt cache file.
If for security reason you renamed the data repository, let say xyzdata for instance then the cache file is to be found at xyzdata/cache/messages.txt even if some install re-created “data” and “data/cache” repositories.