It Feels Like Stone-Age Using FTP To Upgrade Now

Divvens

Divvens

Well-known member
I'm always someone who upgrades to the latest stable version of XenForo, and that would mean my community being offline for close to 1 hour 30 minutes every-time there needed to be an upgrade.

The process I used to follow earlier (all done in approx 1 hr 30 mins):
  • Close board
  • Take/download a database backup via cPanel
  • Upload XenForo contents via FTP
  • Run the upgrade process
  • Open board
But as traffic started getting stable round the clock and there really wasn't any 'low-traffic' time (or at least not any substantial low traffic time) the downtimes were starting to bother me personally, and it would also be a huge chunk of time for people in certain timezones (as they would be the most active during the expected downtime).

I read up a few posts by @Brogan, and I decided to change my approach to upgrades. Now I finish it all within 15 minutes. Thanks to cPanel and SSH :P
  • Close board
  • Run a SQL backup command via SSH and gzip it on the server
  • Upload XenForo upgrade ZIP package via file manager (cPanel)
  • Unzip and copy files over to my home directory
  • Run the upgrade process
  • Open board
I regret not doing this earlier, and when I look back at uploading individual files via FTP I feel like I was living in the stone age.

I'm also aware that you can unzip via SSH and also run the upgrade process via SSH, but I'm not that savvy yet with my VPS and just do things I'm confident in, and since I have cPanel why not make use of it!
 
I SCP the entire ZIP to my site directory, extract it to a temp dir above the root, and then recursively copy the contents of the upload folder to the root.

I then execute the CLI updater. Takes less than 5 minutes.

(I really should take backups, but I don't)

Liam
 
Because I trust XenForo.
No backups needed :)

My average upgrade process takes only less than a minute.

Board closed automatically during upgrade only takes 5-10 seconds.
All done on cli mode.
 
Liam W said:
I then execute the CLI updater.
Click to expand...
Where are there details of the CLI updater? I can't find any in the XenForo manual.

I do pretty much the same as you but I currently run the standard upgrade process. If I can do it quicker with the CLI Updater then I'd be interested to find out more about this.
 
I setup a script to do a backup right before I upgrade. You never know what might happen...

For the readers: I strongly suggest you backup before upgrading.
 
I backup, upload, unzip, copy recursively, upgrade.

Note that when using the CLI upgrader, if caching is enabled in config.php, which uses a system that won't be shared between the CLI and the web server (such as APC), XF will be reading from a stale cache.

The upgrade therefore needs to be finished by the web interface to get the caches rebuilt.
 
Brogan said:
I backup
Click to expand...
Do you do this for every upgrade? I tend not to for 3rd point releases but always do for second point releases (and will do so for 1st point releases too). I also always upgrade my test site before the live site to check for any issues.
 
I take daily backups so if there's a new release and I upgrade within a few hours I don't bother, otherwise I take a new one.

It only takes about 30 seconds to dump and tar the DB.
 
Thanks for the info. I take daily backups too but it's a fair point on the speed of a db dump.
 
XF isn't free and neither are some of the add-ons, nor are they hosted on the XF server so the comparison is invalid.

Your post is also way off topic for the thread, which is about upgrading using FTP (or not).
 
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