XF 2.2 Migrating XF 1.5.21 data to new Xenforo 2.x installation

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jmyres

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I've been maintaining a small film community forum for about 12 years using cPanel on CentOS 7 and XF 1.5.21. Our hosting provider recently asked to migrate our VPS from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8. I made complete backups of everything before the upgrade, but after the move our forum is presenting Service Unavailable errors. I'm see now that I really underestimated the severity of the OS update and hope there is a way forward.

The forum was running extremely well before the update, and I believe our data backups are sound. Is there a good strategy for upgrading to XF 2.3 with our 1.5.21 database and home directory files? Thanks for any input.
 
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The new VPS supports XF's requirements, but our site admin page is not functioning (503 error) after the move to the new OS. Is there a way to migrate our data to, say, a fresh XF 2.0 installation and upgrade from there? Or any other strategy?
 
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The server error log should indicate what is causing the 503 error.

However, if the server environment is not suitable for XF1 then you would need to upload the XF2 files in order to access the install script.

There is an XF importer but you can only import from XF2 into XF2.
 
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Ok, thank you. I am working with my hosting provider and they feel everything is OK except for the PHP version and possibly old plugins as you said. If I can get the admin area working I'll take the steps you mentioned to complete the update to XF 2.0+
 
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From memory I believe XF 1.5.21 will work with PHP 7.2, as will XF 2.3.

So if you can set the PHP version to that you should be good.

You can upgrade PHP to 8.0 once you have upgraded to XF 2.3.
 
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Some good news - our site is up on our new AlmaLinux 8 installation with a lot of help from our hosting provider. It was a combination of allocating more server RAM, setting PHP version 7.2, and making sure key items like htaccess and admin.php were correct/accessible. We have access to our admin area and are going to update to XF 2.2 (latest version our forum style supports).

I've read through the uprade guide. Does this list look complete?

  • Set Maintenance Mode
  • Create new backups
  • Uninstall all plugins (will research upgrades)
  • Set the forum to the default style?
  • Download "upgrade package only"
  • Upload contents to forum root allowing overwrites
  • Navigate to /install and run upgrade (keep browser open during upgrade)
  • Watch out for requests for a fresh install
  • Create /internal_data/install-lock.php if a fresh install is requested
  • Check for outdated templates when done

Thanks
 
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I completed our update to XF 2.2.13 today and everything went very smoothly. Andy sent me his XF1 -> XF2 guide which was extremely helpful. The new forum version is working well so far. I am really thankful to the devs who make these updates go so smoothly.

My last item is to update my PHP version and extensions. Two final questions:

1) Is PHP 8.1 a good choice?

2) When I search for certain extensions to add like SPL, SimpleXML, DOM, JSON, and ctype, they don't appear in the list of available packages in Easy Apache. Are these an assumed part of the basic/ core PHP install, or do I need to acquire them in another way?

This is my first PHP upgrade. Thank you for any input.

Happy New Year, btw!
 
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Thank you for the suggestion. After reading through other threads, I installed 8.1 since 8.0 appears to be near EOL at the end of 2023. Also, the default install on Web Hosting Manager handled all of my PHP extension questions. It looks like everything XenForo needs is somewhat common and either in PHP core or installed by default.

One note on verifying server config: When I ran the XF Requirements checker script, I had to put it in the root directory (/forum) to get an accurate result. Running it outside the forum root directory in /public_html generated a lot of errors showing that nothing was installed.

The PHP update was the last step. I'm finishing a few appearance updates and hope to re-open our forum tonight.
 
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jmyres said:
I installed 8.1 since 8.0 appears to be near EOL at the end of 2023
Click to expand...
From what I remember the XF developers stated PHP 8.1 is fine to run on it... but it's not been fully tested with 8.2 or higher in the current release version. There have been some odd behaviors reported by some using PHP 8.2.
 
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