XF 2.2 Upgrading Large Forums With Minimal Downtime?

[Buffaloed]

I'm looking for advice on how to upgrade large forums from XF 1.5.21 to 2.2.1 with minimal downtime. These forums have approximately 50 million posts, are heavily customized, and have many addons. We have developer versions of all sites.

These are options I'm looking at:
1) upgrade developer site, do all customizations and addons. Upgrade a 2nd developer site with live database from production site. Migrate this database to dev 1, change dns and make dev 1 the new production site.
2) same as 1, but use incremental import. Is that possible? It would be much faster.
Any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[Paul B]

1 is not possible - you can't do a drop in replacement of the database on a site which has had everything upgraded with a database which hasn't.

2 is also not possible as incremental imports are not supported.

Really the only way to do it is to test the upgrade process on the dev site, document everything, then repeat the process on the production site.

 

[Dragonfruit]

You can also hire someone experienced who provides install/upgrade services here. Might be speedier from people who already know what they're doing.

 

[Buffaloed]

1 is not possible - you can't do a drop in replacement of the database on a site which has had everything upgraded with a database which hasn't.

2 is also not possible as incremental imports are not supported.

Really the only way to do it is to test the upgrade process on the dev site, document everything, then repeat the process on the production site.

So #1 should be possible as long as we install the addons last.
Incremental imports may not be supported but they are possible. We migrated about a dozen large vB forums to XF using the @Jake Bunce method.

 

[Paul B]

So #1 should be possible as long as we install the addons last.

Not if you make other changes such as options, styles, etc., no.
Everything is stored in the database.

Incremental imports may not be supported but they are possible. We migrated about a dozen large vB forums to XF using the @Jake Bunce method.

Perhaps, but we have no involvement with third party add-ons.
Besides, this is an upgrade, not an import.

 

[briansol]

The best way, IMO, is to roll it out clean and apply branding and turn it on, and work your butt off over the next 24 hours installing the addons back on one at a time. Test all you add ons offline in a dev enviro and save the code/snippets needed to plug them in to prod quickly.

I usually end up with tabs upon tabs of html/template code in vscode ready to paste in the template that likely needs to be reverted.

Publish it to the 'news' forum so people expect some feature loss for a few days.

 

[Buffaloed]

The best way, IMO, is to roll it out clean and apply branding and turn it on, and work your butt off over the next 24 hours installing the addons back on one at a time. Test all you add ons offline in a dev enviro and save the code/snippets needed to plug them in to prod quickly.

I usually end up with tabs upon tabs of html/template code in vscode ready to paste in the template that likely needs to be reverted.

Publish it to the 'news' forum so people expect some feature loss for a few days.

I'm considering losing a day of data to get it done cleanly without any downtime.
Live Site: disable registrations, post notice that data posted from now until update may be lost, export to dev
Dev: update XF, addons and styles, flip DNS with live site
We can test everything and customize the style so it's just a matter of importing it.
If there's an unforeseen problem we can postpone and not be frantically trying to fix it.

 

[briansol]

I wouldn't recommend that... but it's up to you.

 

[Mr. Jinx]

This is how I usually do this kind of large upgrades:

1. Copy your production site to a dev site
2. Upgrade to new version in dev and upgrade all addons
3. Document all changes and things you discover, make a plan, try to automate as much as possible
4. Make a new copy of prod to dev and test your upgrade plan
5. If all is fine, close your site for a few hours, BACKUP and do the real thing for your production site

Yep, lots of work