Run System Upgrade | Magento 2 Developer Documentation

Overview of System Upgrade

This section discusses how to start System Upgrade, which upgrades the version of Magento core components as well as any other installed components.

You can upgrade in any of the following ways:

Using the System Upgrade utility, a wizard that walks you through the upgrade step by step; continue with this topic.

Use this method if you don’t have a to the Magento server’s file system or if you’re a non-technical user.
Using the command line.

This upgrade method is more advanced and it requires access to the Magento server’s file system.

System upgrade refers to updating the Magento 2.x core components and other installed components. To migrate from Magento 1.x to Magento 2, see the Migration Guide.

Authorization keys from a shared account cannot be used for upgrade. You must get your authorization keys from magento.com account owner.
If you installed the Magento application by cloning the GitHub repository, you cannot use the System Upgrade utility to upgrade the software. Instead, you must update it manually.

System Upgrade checklist

Before you continue, to avoid errors during your installation or update, make sure you verify all of the following:

You set up a Magento file system owner and shared that owner’s group with the web server user group
Your cron jobs are set up and running
Set a value for DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE
File system permissions are set properly

Do not continue without performing these checks. Failure to do so could result in errors.

Set a value for DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE

Magento 2.3 includes security enhancements that requires some data to be converted from serialized data format to JSON encoded format. This conversion occurs during the upgrade and it can take a long time, depending on how much data is in your Magento database.

One or more fields in the following tables are affected: sales_order, sales_order_payment, quote, quote_payment, core_config_data, magento_reward_history, url_rewrite, salesrule, and catalogrule. (This is not a complete list.)

If you have a large amount of data, you can improve performance by setting the value of an environment variable, DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE. By default, it’s set to a value of 50,000.

To set the variable, before the upgrade starts enter the following command as the Magento file system owner in a bash shell prompt:

export DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE <value>

For example,

export DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE 100000

After your upgrade completes, you can unset the variable as follows:

unset DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE

DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE requires memory; avoid setting it to a very large value (approximately 1GB) without testing it first.

Magento file system owner and group

The Magento file system owner group must have write access to Magento directories and files.

Cron jobs are running

Magento requires three cron jobs, all running as the Magento file system owner.

To verify your cron jobs are set up properly, enter the following command as the Magento file system owner:

crontab -l

Results similar to the following should display:

* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/magento2/bin/magento cron:run | grep -v "Ran jobs by schedule" >> /var/www/magento2/var/log/magento.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/magento2/update/cron.php >> /var/www/magento2/var/log/update.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/magento2/bin/magento setup:cron:run >> /var/www/magento2/var/log/setup.cron.log

Another symptom of cron not running is the following error in the Magento Admin:

cron isn't running

To see the error, you might need to click System Messages at the top of the window as follows:

System Messages

For details, see Set up cron.

File system permissions

For security reasons, Magento requires certain permissions on the file system. Permissions are different from ownership. Ownership determines who can perform actions on the file system; permissions determine what the user can do.

Directories in the Magento file system must be writable by the Magento file system owner’s group.

To verify your file system permissions are set properly, either log in to the Magento server or use your hosting provider’s file manager application.

For example, enter the following commands on a Linux system if the Magento application is installed in /var/www/html/magento2:

ls -al /var/www/html/magento2

A sample result follows:

total 1028
drwxrwx---. 12 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:55 .
drwxr-xr-x.  3 root         root     4096 May 11 14:29 ..
drwxrwx---.  4 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 app
drwxrwx---.  2 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 bin
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache 439792 Apr 27 21:23 CHANGELOG.md
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   3422 Apr 27 21:23 composer.json
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache 425214 Apr 27 21:27 composer.lock
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   3425 Apr 27 21:23 CONTRIBUTING.md
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  10011 Apr 27 21:23 CONTRIBUTOR_LICENSE_AGREEMENT.html
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache    631 Apr 27 21:23 COPYING.txt
drwxrwx---.  4 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 dev
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   2926 Apr 27 21:23 Gruntfile.js
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   7592 Apr 27 21:23 .htaccess
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   6419 Apr 27 21:23 .htaccess.sample
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   1358 Apr 27 21:23 index.php
drwxrwx---.  4 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 lib
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  10376 Apr 27 21:23 LICENSE_AFL.txt
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  30634 Apr 27 21:23 LICENSE_EE.txt
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  10364 Apr 27 21:23 LICENSE.txt
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   4108 Apr 27 21:23 nginx.conf.sample
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   1427 Apr 27 21:23 package.json
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   1659 Apr 27 21:23 .php_cs
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache    804 Apr 27 21:23 php.ini.sample
drwxrwx---.  2 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 phpserver
drwxrwx---.  6 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 pub
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   2207 Apr 27 21:23 README_EE.md
drwxrwx---.  7 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 setup
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   3731 Apr 27 21:23 .travis.yml
drwxrwx---.  7 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 update
drwxrws---. 11 magento_user apache   4096 Jun 13 16:05 var
drwxrws---. 29 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 vendor

In the preceding example, the Magento file system owner is magento_user. Directories in the Magento file system have drwxrwx--- permissions (775) and files have -rw-rw-rw- permissions (664).

To get more detailed information, you can optionally enter the following command:

ls -al /var/www/html/magento2/pub

Because Magento deploys static file assets to subdirectories of pub, it’s a good idea to verify permissions and ownership there as well.

For more information, see File system permissions and ownership.