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Learn how to upgrade to the latest version.

How to upgrade PrestaShop

Important

Do not go further if you haven’t made a backup of your shop.

Rollback will be the only way to go back if something does not go well, and this requires a backup.

Learn how to backup your shop

This chapter describes several ways to complete an upgrade of PrestaShop.

Manual upgrade – Process details

This guide gives you the full control on the process. This one has been applied by PrestaShop for several major versions, and thus can be applied on very old shops.

Release download

The first step is to download the latest version on https://www.prestashop.com/.

If you upgrade to another version of PrestaShop 1.6, the release files can be found in a dedicated archives list.

Download can also be done in command line, as done here with the version 1.7.7.5:

wget -O prestashop-upgrade.zip https://www.prestashop.com/download/old/prestashop_1.7.7.5.zip

Archive extraction

Extract the files from the archive with a tool like 7zip

Note starting from PrestaShop 1.7.0.0, the release package contains a zip file itself, which must be extracted as well.

On a Linux terminal, you can use the command `unzip`:

unzip prestashop-upgrade.zip && unzip prestashop.zip

Once you have the folders like classes/, modules/, themes/, etc. you may go on the next step.

Sample files cleanup

Avoid overwrite the production resources (images, conf …) with the default data. These folders can be removed from the new release:

  • img/
  • override/

All the other files present in the new release will overwrite the existing files. All changes you made on the original source code will be lost (by the way, this is not recommended, you should never modify the core files).

Also, rename the “admin” folder to match your shop’s admin folder name. This will prevent an unwanted duplication of the administration content.

Turning on maintenance mode

The shop will now be modified. As it may cause unexpected behavior for you and your customers during the upgrade, we highly recommend you to turn on maintenance mode during the upgrade.

This can be done in your administration panel:

  • On PrestaShop 1.7, in Shop parameters > General > Maintenance tab
  • On PrestaShop 1.6, in Shop parameters > Maintenance

Adding your IP address will allow you to access your shop while it’s in maintenance mode. That way, you can make sure everything is working right before allowing your customers to access it again.

File copy

In this step, we “upgrade” the PrestaShop files by copying the new release content in the existing shop.

Disable cache

You may have activated a caching system (eg. memcache) on your shop. In that case, make sure to disable it in “Advanced Parameters” > “Performance”. You can enable it again once the upgrade process is done. You might want to also delete the var/cache/prod and var/cache/dev folders.

Note about vendor folder: Previous upgrades of PrestaShop 1.7 showed that conflicts may occur when merging the new vendor/ folder with the old one. To avoid this problem, we recommend to delete this folder in the existing shop before copying the new one.

On Windows, copy the new folder content and paste it in your shop folder. You will get warnings that files already exists in the destination folder. Choose “overwrite” to continue.

On linux, the copy can be done in your terminal:

cp -R <path_to_the_new_release>/* <path_to_the_current_shop>/

Example:

cp -R ~/Downloads/prestashop/* /var/www/html/

Database upgrade

Once the files have been copied, your shop database is ready to be upgraded.

Some web hosting providers gives you two user accounts to access your database. One with full privileges the other for using in scripts with limited rights. To be able to use this Database upgrade script you have to use the account with full privileges.

All the changes to apply have been defined in the install folder, running them can be done with a specific PHP script.

When you’re ready, run the file install/upgrade/upgrade.php.

This can be done with a browser, by reaching the address http://<shop_domain>/install/upgrade/upgrade.php, or from your server’s command line:

php install/upgrade/upgrade.php

In both cases, an XML log will be displayed. The result can be found in the attribute result of the first tag <action>:

  • ok if updates have been found and executed
  • error if something went wrong
  • info for next actions, displaying the details on the process

Execution log

When the upgrade script found some upgrades to apply, the SQL queries run will be listed along their respective result.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><action result="ok" id="">
<action result="info" id="1.7.0.5"><![CDATA[[OK] PHP 1.7.0.5 : /* PHP:ps_update_tabs(); */]]></action>
<action result="info" id="1.7.0.5"><![CDATA[[OK] SQL 1.7.0.5 : ALTER TABLE `ps_currency` MODIFY `name` varchar(64) NOT NULL]]></action>
<action result="info" id="1.7.1.0"><![CDATA[[OK] SQL 1.7.1.0 : SET SESSION sql_mode = '']]></action>
<action result="info" id="1.7.1.0"><![CDATA[[OK] SQL 1.7.1.0 : SET NAMES 'utf8']]></action>
[...]

You can double check that each action is marked as “OK”. If not, additional details will be shown after the request, which can help you fix the issue and re-execute the request manually on your database. In some cases, you may need to restore your database backup and start over.

Error codes

An error code can also be displayed. Each code is related to a message described here:

  • Error #27: The shop is running a newer version than the content provided by the install folder.
  • Error #28: The shop is already at the version you try to upgrade to.
  • Error #29: Could not find the current version. Check your database parameters file and the database connection.
  • Error #31: Unable to find upgrade directory in the installation path, does the folder install/upgrade/sql exist and is not empty?
  • Error #32: No upgrade needs to be applied.
  • Error #33: Error while loading a SQL upgrade file. Check your permissions of the folder install/upgrade/sql.
  • Error #40: The version provided in the file install/install_version.php is invalid.
  • Error #43: Error while upgrading database schema using doctrine.
  • Error #44: Error while updating translations.
  • Error #45: Error while enabling theme.

Cleanup

Before going further, a few things should now be cleaned.

  • The install folder, used to run the database upgrades, is not needed anymore and can be safely deleted.
  • When opening your shop (in the front or back office) on your browser, you may see some visual issues. This can be due to your old assets being still served by a cache. Reload them by force-refreshing the page (press ctrl+R on Windows / Linux or cmd+R on Mac OS) or clearing your browser’s cache.

Modules upgrade

Your modules files have been upgraded during the file copy, however many of them may require additional changes on the database. Please check the module page in your Back Office to see if upgrades are waiting to be run.

Go to your administration panel and login. You will notice the version displayed has changed on the login page. Then in the menu, click on the module page to reach your catalog.

On PrestaShop 1.6, this page can be found in “Module & Services”. Click on “Update all” at the top of the page to run all available upgrades:

On PrestaShop 1.7, the same feature can be found in the Improve >> Modules page, under the tab “Notifications”:

1-click upgrade module

If the manual process seems too tedious, other solutions exist to complete an upgrade.

PrestaShop provides the module 1-click upgrade for free on the marketplace and your shop administration panel. It executes the previously given process automatically, and is available for almost all versions of PrestaShop.

You can read more about it here.

Support service

Doing an upgrade by yourself can be risky. If you feel uncomfortable with doing it on your own, you can leave it to our support team who will handle the backup and the upgrade to the last minor version for you (1.6 → 1.6, 1.7 → 1.7 etc.).

Basically, the process and the result will be the same. The existing data on the shop will be kept, as well as your module and your current theme.

You can subscribe for the upgrade service on the marketplace.

Many agencies and freelancers in your area may also provide this kind of service.