Upgrade path from EE1.7 stuck on PHP versions
How Do I?
I was running a site on EE 1.7 (for many years! Such stability!), but recently the host updated all of their LAMP stacks to PHP 7.2 and I neglected to take action in time.
Now when I start the update process to EE2 (in order to get to EE5), it loads the first screen, but upon clicking the Begin button, I get a 500 error. I’m assuming this is because it requires PHP 5 to run the upgrade wizard. I’m stuck. What can I do?
You’ll need to perform the upgrades in an environment that each step supports. That means to upgrade to v2, you need to be on PHP <= 7.1. If you have add-ons, you may need to address incompatibilities in those as well. But after upgrading to v2, you can move on to 3/4/5 on PHP 7.2, and it’ll be a cinch. If your host doesn’t have PHP 7.1 or lower available, you’ll need to replicate your site from a database backup on a different environment—locally perhaps—and upgrade it there, then migrate back to the host.
Okay. I’ll have to ask the host to migrate my sites then. Thanks for confirming!
I migrated the site files and database over to a different hosting account (same host) where PHP 5.x is supported. I’m now getting errors: “The system path does not appear to be set correctly. Please open your path.php file and correct the path.” Which path variables should I set up in order to get this working?
EE1 used a path.php file to hold certain settings. The system_path setting needs to match the name of your main ee system folder, which by default is just named ‘system’. If it was renamed, you need to update it in path.php. For example:
// Path to the directory containing your backend files
$system_path = “./new_system_name/”;
$site_name = ‘myshortsitename’;
$cp_url = ‘http://www.mysitename.com/admin.php’;Everything else in the path.php file also needs to match your site setup.
EE2 and beyond folded the path.php settings into index.php, I believe, so there’s no path.php file after EE1.
Hope that helps!