How to upgrade Magento 2 to the latest version

How to upgrade Magento 2 to the latest version

Magento 2 is a living project that receives updates which range from small patches to major releases. Besides new features and fixing broken features, a Magento 2 update also brings one or more security enhancements. These are important to get as soon as possible in order to guarantee you and your customer a safe experience.

As of writing this, the latest Magento 2 version is 2.3.5. To get started with updating, the first thing you should do is turning on maintenance mode on your webshop. This will notify customers that a planned maintenance is happening and will prevent your customers from seeing a broken webshop.

If you want to know how to install Magento 2, check out our other article How to install Magento 2 on Ubuntu 18.04 / Windows 10

Prerequisites

Before we actually start modifying important files, we need to back them up first.

Enable maintenance mode

Because we will be handling files that are being used by our Magento installation we need to set the store into maintenance mode. This will prevent our customers from seeing a broken store.

$ bin/magento maintenance:enable

Backing up our composer.json file

We will start with backing up our composer.json. This file holds important information about our Magento 2 installation such as our dependencies.
The following command will create a copy of composer.json and call it composer.json.bak.

$ cp composer.json composer.json.bak

Changing from open source to commerce and vice versa

The following step is optional and only required if you are upgrading from an open source Magento 2 installation to Magento 2 commerce.

$ composer remove magento/product-community-edition --no-update

Next, we need to add the composer dependency for the latest Magento 2 version. In our case, 2.3.5.

# Use this one for the open source edition
$ composer require magento/product-community-edition 2.3.5 --no-update
# Use this one for the commercial edition
$ composer require magento/product-enterprise-edition 2.3.5 --no-update

Note we use the following --no-update to make sure we do not automatically update all the dependencies. We are not done adding additional packages so to avoid getting errors we use the no-update parameter.

Download the dependencies

Just like many big software platforms, Magento 2 requires many other dependencies besides the core framework in order to fully work. Let us install these next.

$ composer require --dev phpunit/phpunit:~6.2.0 friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer:~2.10.1 lusitanian/oauth:~0.8.10 pdepend/pdepend:2.5.2 sebastian/phpcpd:~3.0.0 squizlabs/php_codesniffer:3.2.2 --no-update

Sometimes during updates certain packages are not needed anymore, we remove these in the next step. If you do not have these packages you can still run the command without issues.

$ composer remove --dev sjparkinson/static-review fabpot/php-cs-fixer --no-update

Update the composer.json file

Now it is time to update our composer.json file manually. We need to add a couple autoload paths. This will make sure that these specific files are guaranteed to get loaded.

"autoload" : {
    "psr-4": {
        "Magento\\Framework\\": "lib/internal/Magento/Framework/",
        "Magento\\Setup\\": "setup/src/Magento/Setup/",
        "Magento\\": "app/code/Magento/",
        "Zend\\Mvc\\Controller\\": "setup/src/Zend/Mvc/Controller/"
    }
}

Magento update folder

The following step is optional if the Magento updater is installed. The updater should be located in your /update

First, let us start with making a backup of the update directory

$ cp -R update update.bak

Next, we will create a Composer project, use the first one for the Magento Open Source edition and the second one for the Magento Commerce edition

$ composer create-project --repository=https://repo.magento.com magento/project-community-edition=2.3.5 temp_dir --no-install

$ composer create-project --repository=https://repo.magento.com magento/project-enterprise-edition=2.3.5 temp_dir --no-install

Next, we can remove the old update directory and move our newly downloaded one

$ rm -rf update
$ mv temp_dir/update .
$ rm -rf temp_dir

Update metadata

The following step is optional as well but recommended to keep a clean working space.
Change the “name”, “version” and “description” fields to match with the new Magento version number. In our case, 2.3.5.

$ nano composer.json

Updating Magento

Now we are finally done setting up for our update. Time to actually update Magento 2.

Run composer update

$ composer update

Clearing the Magento caches

Next, we need to clean the Magento cache

bin/magento cache:clean

Our next step is to clear the var and generated subdirectories

$ rm -rf var/cache/*
$ rm -rf var/page_cache/*
$ rm -rf generated/code/*

Note if you are using a cache storage like Redis or Varnish, clean that cache as well

Updating the Magento database

Update the database schema and data

$ bin/magento setup:upgrade

Wrapping up

We should be about done with the update. The only thing that is left for us to do is to disable maintenance mode and start testing.

$ bin/magento maintenance:disable

If you use Varnish, restart it.

We have updated Magento to the latest version!