Upgrade existing umbraco project with version 4.8.1 to latest version 7.5.3

Question

I want to upgrade my existing umbraco project with version 4.8.1 to latest version 7.5.3, but i don't know the exact way, whether to convert incremental step by step (from 4.8.1 to 4.10.X, 4.10.X to 4.11.X and so on..) or directly to version 7.5.3, Please give me the proper solution that let me upgrade my existing versioned umbraco project to latest version of umbraco.

Thanks

Answer 1

There is no perfect way of doing this kind of upgrade. It all depends how complex was your solution and what you've built at top of Umbraco itself. I suggest you to create a backup of everything and just give it a shot to do update straight from one to the latest version. You can use nuget for this if you're familiar with Visual Studio (it will create backups for configuration files and merge it automatically for you).

You can also watch Per Ploug's session from this year Codegarden. It has a lot of tips and tricks for all people who wants to upgrade their old sites. Video is available here: https://video.twentythree.net/migrating-mom-to-uaas. Can't remember, but it may be possible that you will need to update to v6.x something to be able to process further directly to 7.x. But create backups and play with it - it's my opinion and suggestion :)

Answer 2

I have done a couple of these now, one of them on a very large site. I would definitely upgrade v4 incrementally to each minor revision because the upgrade process was not as reliable as it is now and there is potentially breaking changes as well as a number of files to remove. Read ahead about the Version specific upgrades found on the Our Umbraco site.

Luckily for you, there are Nuget packages all the way back to the version you are starting from so I would take advantage of that and upgrade the package at each step and commit your changes to your source code repository and tag them before moving on to the next. It helps when you come to repeat the process on your production site.

So, my first attempted upgrade path would probably be as follows:

4.8.1 > 4.9.1 > 4.10.1.1 > 4.11.10 > 6.2.6 > 7.5.x

One of the biggest gotchas I found was reading the release notes and making sure you REMOVE all of the files that are no longer required and detailed in the release notes.

Compared to how it used to be there is now a lot more information around to help you if and when you get stuck.