XF 1.4 1.4.5 to 1.5.13 (and ultimately 2.0)

[denzil]

Hello,

I currently manage a XF site that is on 1.4.5 on a VPS. I'm interested in upgrading it to 1.5.13 but am slightly weary of doing it in production. I've done it before but I wouldn't necessarily call it a best practice either.

Ultimately, I'm interested in moving our site to AWS so that I can set up staging and production environments in order to vet things out before pushing it to prod (and get more familiar with AWS in general). I was originally thinking of waiting until XF 2.0 before pushing it to AWS but I'm unsure of the release timeline for 2.0. If I do go through this, my assumption is that I just have to take a current snapshot of our DB and point the new installation to that snapshot. Looking for anyone's experience or thoughts here as they'd be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Denzil

 

[Paul B]

Having a copy of your current site as a test environment for testing add-ons, changes, upgrades, etc. is always recommended.

I would never consider doing a second point upgrade (1.4.x to 1.5.x) on a production site, never mind a third point upgrade.

This guide explains how to duplicate your site: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/how-to-duplicate-a-live-site-to-use-as-a-test-site.2792/

 

[Optic]

1.5 also introduced some pretty big changes including thread tags, automatic welcome PMs for new users , mass sending alerts to users and two factor authentication.
https://xenforo.com/community/threads/xenforo-1-5-0-released.103412/

Would be worth reviewing add-ons as I remember removing a few add-ons due to them becoming core features in 1.5.

 

[xenfans]

Hello,

I currently manage a XF site that is on 1.4.5 on a VPS. I'm interested in upgrading it to 1.5.13 but am slightly weary of doing it in production. I've done it before but I wouldn't necessarily call it a best practice either.

Ultimately, I'm interested in moving our site to AWS so that I can set up staging and production environments in order to vet things out before pushing it to prod (and get more familiar with AWS in general). I was originally thinking of waiting until XF 2.0 before pushing it to AWS but I'm unsure of the release timeline for 2.0. If I do go through this, my assumption is that I just have to take a current snapshot of our DB and point the new installation to that snapshot. Looking for anyone's experience or thoughts here as they'd be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Denzil

What we do is clone the files and database, turn off email in config and make a list of the plugins we use and if they have a upgrade version for 1.5 available. (dont forget to update config.php to point to the new database for the test)

Then i test the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5.13, and upgrade the plugins.

see where it breaks or not. If everything went smooth, then we do it live.

It's worth a test at least, as it doesn't affect live site at all.

The upgrade on any site usually is done in 15 minutes, then it's a matter or it taking forever for counters to rebuild.

Bigger sites can also upgrade from the CLI on the vps. Also worth testing.

 

[Mendalla]

The site I admin went 1.3.6 (IIRC, definitely a 1.3.x release) to 1.5.13 very painlessly and with just minimal testing this morning but we don't use any add-ons. This is a very simple forum site using just out-of-box features and a template. I did take a full backup of both site and database before in case I needed to rollback but it was not needed. I am not even looking at 2.0 until it is out of dev and into at least a beta level release.