I’m running Dolibarr on a shared hosting server (Linux), and I’ve successfully updated Dolibarr to version 21.0.0. Everything is working fine, but I am updating another installation on the same server, and this upgrade requires the PHP version to be updated above the current PHP 7.2.34. The installer is recommending PHP 8.1.31. This seems to fall into the acceptable range for Dolibarr, but I am very inexperienced with Linux in general, and although I maintain my local IT environment, I am not running any webservers, etc.
If it matters, both installations were installed from Softaculous, and are being upgraded / updated using their automated script update engine.
So my question is: Do I need to DO anything to Dolibarr before or after the PHP is updated, or will it be a non-event, operationally. I don’t want to kill my installation, as I use it in my actual business, so I am just trying to exercise prudence before I pull the trigger on an infrastructure update like PHP that has the potential to break everything. Please advise.
Hi @deebee4
It should be fine…
PHP 7.2.34 is vulnerable see PHP: Unsupported Branches
Best practice though for critical business software is to have a test instance with latest business db backup.
Upgrade there first and test if everything is alright, then upgrade your main instance.
Hi and thanks for taking the time to reply. That sounds reasonable. The complication for me is I am operating on a shared hosting platform, and I don’t know how (or if it’s even possible) to run two different versions of PHP, one for Dolibarr and another version for the other package. I originally cloned my Dolibarr installation to make sure the upgrade didn’t break anything, and it is working fine (apparently) with PHP 7.2.34. I’m not wanting to keep the old version of PHP or anything, but the upgrade script for Dolibarr may have addressed any changes to PHP, if there are any such. Since I am not using the Dolibarr “updater” script, there would not be any automatic configuration changes. I hope this is adequately expressing my concern, which I do not know if is valid or not.
The issue is that I am upgrading an installation of a completely different script (on the same server) that requires PHP to upgrade to > 8.1 (suggested 8.1.31). They both (presumably) use whatever version of PHP is installed. But since it’s being done outside of the Dolibarr update script environment, i don’t know if the new version of PHP will “just work”, and if there are some configuration files that need to be updated or something like that.
So I guess my question is: Is the process of upgrading PHP just totally transparent to Dolibarr (as long as it’s an acceptable / compatible revision level), or is there some configuration work to do if the PHP version changes?
it is possible if you do it in containers, but maybe that is too much to change and maybe your shared hosting platform doesn’t like that. However a small VPS linux server is less than €5 euro a month at Hetzner and on that you can run a Dolibarr installation - that is what I do. Naturally it depends on your numbers of users, but if you have many users, then just get a bigger VPS.
Regarding your upgrade, I would suggest that you take a complete backup of dolibarr, both database and documents + configuration.
Store that on a different server, and once that is done, shut down current dolibarr so no usage of dolibarr happens while you change the platform underneath Dolibarr.
Thanks for your input. Sounds very good. I love my hosting solution at MochaHost. Very responsive tech support (I haven’t raised a ticket on this issue because I’m doing my research first). I don’t really want to spin up another server just to find out the answer if I can get one here.
I am hoping for an answer from somebody who knows enough about what’s “under the hood” to be able to tell me if there’s any configuration of Dolibarr required before I pull the trigger on the update of PHP.
You can see here that Dolibarr 21.0.0 officially supports both PHP versions although with newer PHP versions above 8.2 you may encounter some warnings but not with 8.1.31
So no configuration needed when changing PHP versions, go up ahead and change to PHP 8.1.31
