Upgrade Process

[nevetS]

I am starting to think about the 3.7 upgrade process. Certainly, it's nice for the community to experience new features.

I am concerned to a degree, as I haven't been through an upgrade on an active board just yet.

As far as upgrading the board, my plan is to take a look at all of the plugins I have installed, review each thread for 3.7 support and make a decision as to whether a particular plugin is necessary or whether I'm willing to risk it where there is not clarity of 3.7 compatibility.

Once I've checked out that road, I do have some other small php customizations that I can deal with as far as php code. Nothing too fancy and I'm not worried in that regard. They shouldn't take more than an hour, and they only concern a movable type integration point so no end users should see a problem.

The area that concerns me is template edits. I SHOULD be able to go through and find the template changes I originally made and re-make them to the new environment. Fortunately, I know HTML and PHP pretty well, and I have a forum that validates, so I'll be able to spot and fix any typos or errors. The trouble for me is: How do I make this happen with zero impact on my user base? Downtime isn't something I want to deal with.

I'm thinking the following:
1) back up my live system.
2) restore the database to a new database
3) set up a new virtual host in apache, copying all files from my original site
4) point my hosts file at the new IP address
5) go in and make template edits and any code changes.
6) back up any files edited
7) back up my customized and upgraded database
8) download my newly customized style
9) turn the production board off
10) back up the production database (new posts since last backup)
11) upload new files
12) run upgrade
13) install/upload appropriate plugins
14) upload customized style
15) upload any manually edited files
16) turn board back on

Past experience tells me that the upgrade process itself will take just a couple of minutes, and uploading plugins and styles just a few minutes more. I'm thinking I can get away with a downtime of less than 10 minutes in the middle of the night when there is no activity.

Any comments on my plan? Concerns?

[Lynne]

That is basically what I do. However, I doubt you are talking about the upgrade only taking a couple of minutes. The last time I did an upgrade, I went from 3.0.12 to 3.6.8 and my site was down for about two hours. Most of that time was taken running the upgrade script and making my backup of the database and all the files (you need both of those if you need to downgrade cuz things didn't work out) and scping my backup/files to another server. Once the site was backed up and upgraded, it probably only took about 10 minutes to install the plugins and import the templates. Of course, then I did a couple of tests on my board to make sure my custom products worked.

[nevetS]

Good to know! The upgrade scripts have been pretty quick for me in the past - but that's with some pretty small databases.

I'll get a feel for the time it takes on my site with this one well before the scheduled downtime, so if I need to plan for more time I will.

[Lynne]

I put a notice at the top of the index page about three days before the upgrade letting my users know the date of the upgrade. Then, the day before I posted a notice telling then the time I would start. Then the day of, I posted saying one hour until, and 30 minutes until, and then finally took down the site. I got no complaints from any of the users about the site being down and we get about 9000 unique users onto the site a day.