Upgrading from 8.3.3 & 8.1 to Version 9

Developing with Concrete
1

Hi,

We have been working with C5 for a long time, and we have a lot of clients on versions 8.1-8.3.3

As we now need to upgrade to support PHP8 with urgency, we cloned the sites and tried to update them, however there is no information on any required upgrade paths.

I tried to upgrade right to 9.1.1 but that failed due to missing database columns. So I then tried to upgrade one of the 8.3.3 sites to 8.5.9 and that had the same issue. I manually added the column to get past it and now it complains about unknown column types on the database.

I am doing this all via command line, replacing the concrete folder, the Updates page in our admin panels always says there are no updates and the generated_overrides config files always just say the latest version is the one we are on, so command line is the only way to process them.

I cannot find anything to say that 8.3.3 needs to go to a certain upgrade before it can go further, maybe someone has info on this?

Thanks

2

Hi @pixelhero A lot of our team is on holiday next week - I’ll have engineering take a look.
Thank you,
Jess

3

@pixelhero what columns and column types were missing?

The only potential stumbling blocks I can think of when upgrading sites from 8.1 through 8.3 is:

  • the database charset might need to be updated to utf8mb4 around version 8.5.5 or so. There’s a CLI command you can use to do this: concrete5 c5:database:charset:set utf8mb4

  • the minimum supported PHP version was raised to 7.4 around version 8.5.8, so if your older sites are running on PHP 7.2 or lower, you’ll need to upgrade to version 8.5.7, upgrade PHP to 7.4, then continue upgrading to 8.5.9.

In my experience, it’s best to upgrade through to 8.5.9 before moving on to 9+.