Magento Open Source v1 covering Magento versions up to 1.9.x is still the eCommerce platform for many small businesses and whilst we all know we need to move to Magento 2 the time and resources required to migrate a successful v1 shop to v2 are for many people prohibitive.

PHP7

The original system requirements for Magento 1 were based on PHP5. Magento 1 users were forced to stay with an operating system that distributed PHP5, a PHP upgrade would break Magento. There were unofficial patches available that would make Magento compatible with later versions of PHP but I was always wary of applying unofficial core code changes to my live shops.

In September 2018 Magento made the PHP7 patches official, and they were included in the December 1.9.4.0 update.

My Magento live Shops were built on Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 LTS which included PHP5. My Docker containers used Trusty as the main OS for my docker images. Now, with the 1.9.4.0 update we can move to current versions of PHP and enjoy the performance benefits of PHP7.x.

PHUSION

As a big fan of Ubuntu I usually build my Ubuntu Docker containers using the Phusion Ubuntu base image. For my Magento2 containers I compile PHP myself so for Magento 1.9.4.0 it was pretty easy to migrate a Magento2 Dockerfile to use for Magento1 on PHP 7.2.

Upgrade

Upgrading my Docker Magento1 PHP5 shops to PHP7 was simply a case of applying the 1.9.4.0 upgrade, replacing my old Ubuntu Trusty base image with the Ubuntu Bionic PHP7.2 image and restarting.

I am still testing all my extensions and associated PHP5 Magento application code for functionality but so far the upgrade looks good.

You can find my Magento 1.9.4.0 PHP7.2 image here. My Dev shop running Magento 1.9.4.0 with PHP7.2 in Docker is here.

Github for the source files is here https://github.com/gaiterjones/docker-magento1-php7

How to upgrade from Magento CE 1.9.1.x to 1.9.2.0

I have used Magento connect to upgrade Magento before, but I no longer find it reliable enough, it is likely to throw up errors leaving you uncertain as the the status of the code. Here is my preferred method for a step upgrade like this.

You will need full command line access to your server.

TEST, test, test

Carry out the first upgrade on your development server. I use a VMWare virtual server so that I can take a snapshot of the running 1.9.1.x system before the upgrade. Then I can always revert to the previous version if I need to, or if I need to run the upgrade again.

Note that this upgrade method will only work when you are certain that all Magento core code, template and locale files/templates have not been modified.

BACKUP, backup, backup

Take a backup of your Magento database.

Take a backup of your 1.9.1.x installation folder.

Installation

• Obtain the Magento CE 1.9.2.0 source from the Magento download site
  • at the time of writing it was called magento-1.9.2.0-2015-07-07-08-53-58.zip.

• Unzip the source files into a working folder. This will create a magento folder containing the 1.9.2.0 source.

• Take your shop offline
  • stop your cron tasks
  • put the shop into maintenance mode
    • touch /home/pathtomagentoroot/maintenance.flag

• Copy the 1.9.2.0 source over your 1.9.1.x installation
  • I like to use rsync to do this :
    • rsync -avI –exclude=app/etc/local.xml –exclude=app/etc/config.xml –exclude=index.php –exclude=.htaccess ./magento/ /home/www/magento/
  • Where /home/www/magento is the path to the 1.9.1.x installation.

• Reset Magento permissions

• Update modman modules
  • Note that 1.9.2.0 will overwrite Cm_RedisSession if you are using this for Magento Redis session caching force a modman update to get the latest module code.
    • modman update-all –force

• Put shop online
  • rm /home/pathtomagentoroot/maintenance.flag
  • restart cron

• Test
  • login to admin
    • refresh caches
  • test frontend
    • test login
    • test orders
    • test new customer registration

• Patch affected template files
  • If your Magento frontend theme has extended/modified any of the following template files you need to manually patch them to fix the vulnerabilities identified in the SUPEE-6285 update
    • app/design/frontend/base/default/template/checkout/cart.phtml
    • app/design/frontend/base/default/template/checkout/cart/noItems.phtml
    • app/design/frontend/base/default/template/checkout/onepage/failure.phtml
    • app/design/frontend/base/default/template/rss/order/details.phtml
    • app/design/frontend/base/default/template/wishlist/email/rss.phtml
    • app/design/frontend/rwd/default/template/checkout/cart.phtml

• Test again

You should have a working 1.9.2.0 dev store with the latest security patches, you can now plan the deployment of this update via your staging to live server.

Here are my notes after upgrading my dev store from 1.8.x to 1.9 using the command line.

Backup existing install folder and database

1. Magento source
tar -cvvf /home/backup/magento.tar /home/www/magentoinstallfolder/

2. Magento DB
/usr/bin/mysqldump -h localhost -u USER -pPASS magento | gzip > ~/backup/folder/db-magento.sql.gz

1. Remove cached files and temp files

rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/*
rm -rf downloader/pearlib/download/*
rm -rf downloader/var/cache/*
rm -rf downloader/var/report/*
rm -rf downloader/var/tmp/*
rm -rf media/catalog/product/cache/*
rm -rf media/tmp/*
rm -rf var/cache/*
rm -rf var/session/*

2. Restart memcached (if being used)

3. Sync mage

./mage mage-setup

./mage sync

4, Run upgrade

./mage upgrade-all

5. Reset ownership and permissions on all files and folders.

Check Magento is operational, login and refresh caches.

If all is well take a well deserved break and maybe eat a cream cake. If all is not well restore from backup…