Upgrading Magento from an old version is a headache. Due to poor community support, Magento is no fun to work with. Good for business, bad for average or beginner users.

It is certainly not a good idea to upgrade Magento from 1.3 to 1.7 directly as there might be some extensions that are compatible with 1.3 and not with 1.7. Try to upgrade from 1.3 to 1.5 and then upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6 and finally 1.6 to 1.7. Safest bet!

Anyhow, here’s how we do it!

1.  First you have to login to your hosting environment using SSH.

Refer to Part-I of this article for details.

2.  Make a Backup!

You can skip this step all together, however, please make a backup of everything prior to beginning the upgrade.

Create a test environment somewhere on your server (preferably away from your production installation).

I usually create a subdomain on another domain and put all the files there.

Create a new database for this sub-domain.

Make a backup of the current database in SSH via:

$ mysqldump -u user -p DB_NAME > DB-NAME.sql 

Or you can make backup from phpmyadmin. While making backup from phpmyadmin check ‘Disable check foreign key checks’option.

Dump the backup you just made into your new database

$ mysql -u user -p DB_NAME < DB-NAME.sql

Or you can do the same from phpmyadmin.

Change the database settings to point to new database

$ vi app/etc/local.xml

Change your magento URLs:

In phpmyadmin go to table ‘core_config_data’ and change ‘web/unsecure/base_url’ and ‘web/secure/base_url’ to new location.

REMEMBER to update steps 5-6 after the upgrade is done and upgraded files and database are transferred to the production environment.

3.  Download the latest version of Magento.

wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.7.0.1/magento-1.7.0.1.tar.gz  

tar xvfz magento-1.5.1.0.tar.gz 

4.  Disallow access to your site if doing the upgrade on a production environment (Skip this step if performing on test environemnt)

1.mv .htaccess .htaccess-bkp

2.cp magento/.htaccess .

3.   cp .htaccess .htaccess-new

In your new .htaccess change the Order Allow to (at the bottom of file):

#Order allow,deny

#Allow from all

Order deny,allow

Deny from all

Allow from YOUR IP ADDRESS

Also, up the memory usage (especially if your database backup is over 500MB–hopefully you’re running magento on a dedicated server.)

php_value memory_limit 1024M

	

php_value max_execution_time 45000

5.  Flush all caches

rm -rf var/cache/*

	

rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/* downloader/pearlib/download/*

6.  Remove the ‘downloader’ and ‘app/design/frontend/base’ directory

rm -rf downloader

	

rm -rf app/design/frontend/base

7.  Copy ‘downloader’ and ‘app/design/frontend/base’ folder from magento-1.7.0.1

cp -a magento/downloader .

	

cp -a magento/app/design/frontend/base/ app/design/frontend/

8.   Install/get ‘mage’.

cp magento/mage .

	

chmod 755 ./mage

We do this because the ‘pear’ method doesn’t work anymore–it only does an upgrade up to magento 1.4.2; it won’t work upgrading any higher than that.

9.      Do the upgrade

** IMPORTANT: Make sure your Magento Connect Manager ‘Preferred State‘ is set to ‘Stable‘ **

It’s located here: https://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/downloader/index.php?A=settings

./mage mage-setup .

	

./mage sync --force

	

./mage install http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community Mage_All_Latest --force

 rm -rf var/cache/* var/session/*

rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/* downloader/pearlib/download/*

chmod 755 mage

php shell/indexer.php reindexall

./mage upgrade-all --force

yes | cp -Rf magento/* .  #this copies over all the magento files you extracted over your current installation

10.   Visit the home page of your upgraded site. This will trigger the magento upgrade process.

This can take anywhere from 2-30minutes, so be patient. You’ll also likely get a browser error before the upgrade is done-don’t worry about it, it’s normal, and keep waiting…

Do the following and watch mysql process until it stops using up high cpu usage–once it does, you’ll know the database upgrade is done.

1.       top

11.  Login to the /admin section of your site and make sure the version number reflects the version you just upgraded to.

12.  Change back your .htaccess to original value (if step-4 is performed)

cp .htaccess-new .htaccess

13. Set the proper file permissions

1.   find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \; 

2.  find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

3.  chmod o+w var var/.htaccess app/etc

4.  chmod -R o+w media

14. Fix magento URLs

php shell/indexer.php reindexall

Troubleshooting

If something went wrong (and it probably did) you have several options.

If a newer version 1.6.x-RC is showing then mage installer grabbed the release candidate stuff instead.

 yes | cp -Rf magento/* .

This will copy the proper version of magento overwriting your current installation

The site just hangs after upgrade (keeps loading for minutes on end):

Be patient, use top in SSH and wait for mysql high CPU usage to go down

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function toHtml()

edit app/design/frontend/default/YOURTHEME/layout/page.xml

or edit app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/page.xml

Change from

<block type="core/profiler" output="toHtml"/>

to:

<block type="core/profiler" output="toHtml" name="core_profiler"/>

Fresh start: in case something went terribly wrong

Go into phpmyadmin and drop all the tables so your database is empty (you’ll get errors in phpmyadmin about foreign keys; that’s normal, just repeat till all tables are gone).I prefer this over the SSH method, cause it’s too easy to drop the wrong database by accident)

However, there’s a good chance phpMyAdmin may run out of resources when doing this, so you may want to checkout this post instead: Drop all tables in MySQL via SSH

Now re-dump your database backup:

mysql -u user -p DB_NAME < DB-NAME.sql

and copy over a fresh version of magento over your current install

yes | cp -Rf magento/* .    
rm -rf var/cache/*
rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/* downloader/pearlib/download/*

Visit your site again…

Written by Masum