XF 2.0 Best upgrade steps with minimal downtime

[Marcel]

I'm planning on upgrading our board to XF2 quite soon. Having upgraded the forums many times before I'd like to reach out and ask the community for guidance on the best upgrade path for minimal downtime.

I'd like to get as much of the XF2 installation set up in advance while keeping the current XF1 open as long as possible.
Use the latest backup and install on a subdomain / different root perhaps?

What's the preferred method of going about this?
Edit : Forgot to add, we have a few XF1 addons to uninstall first. Some will be replaced with XF2 versions, some won't. Downtime for some of this functionality isn't important. Core XF/XFMG/XFR/ES functionality is more important.

 

[Paul B]

I'd like to get as much of the XF2 installation set up in advance while keeping the current XF1 open as long as possible.

You can't do that when doing an upgrade - you upgrade the existing XF1 installation, it's not an import.

All you can really do is do an upgrade on a test installation which will let you test the procedure and set up the style, which can then be exported and imported.

 

[Marcel]

I think I'll revert back to my original idea.
Strip down the current XF1, taking out the addons which we will no longer need.
Take a backup, and install it into a second, private XF installation.
Upgrade it to XF2 in the background then switch over to it when ready. Just have the usual caveat of any posts/changes made in the meantime will be lost.

I'll just have to do it as quickly as possible to minimize the downtime.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Do a test migration first, and write down each step as you go. This way if you run into a roadblock which takes time to solve, you can have the solution written down and ready to implement quickly during the live migration.

 

[gldtn]

Also, test each add-on while your at it. I'm currently doing this now and have encountered a couple of bugs with add-ons that I would've not been able to recover if it was not on a test migration!

 

[Jean-Baptiste]

Do you have cli access ?

 

[Marcel]

Thank you everyone.
@MySiteGuy Good idea. I've done that for the previous ugprades. I've already done a pre-run, but I'm in the middle of another just to make sure all kinks are ironed beforehand
@gldtn Most of the addons are either going to be upgraded to XF2 versions (Which will be part of my upgrade test path), or will be uninstalled before I upgrade (so they can remove their stuff from the db)

@Jean-Baptiste Indeed I do. I much prefer using the CLI for upgrades etc in XF2. Web timeouts in XF1 have always irked me