Planning an Upgrade of CA and Ubuntu

ALKaleideum

Hi All,

We are in the discussion and research phase of planning an upgrade from CA 1.8 and ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS to CA 2.0 and the newest version of Ubuntu 24.04.2. Can anyone provide the steps for properly backing up the CA database in case this upgrade goes very wrong? Thank you!

jeffschneider

This should be a good starting point
https://manual.collectiveaccess.org/providence/user/setup/backups.html

ALKaleideum

jeffschneider Thank you so much for that! I knew it had to be somewhere in the manual and was just overlooking it

scottcampbell

ALKaleideum

Did you ever develop a process for this? I'm in a similar situation, going from CA1.8 to 2.0 and Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04.

But it's a catch-22. I can't figure out which to upgrade first. CA 2.0 needs PHP8, which isn't available in 20.04, so I can't start there. And 22.04/24.04 doesn't include PHP7, which is needed for CA 1.8.

The only idea I have is to back everything up (as per @jeffschneider 's URL), upgrade Ubuntu all the way to 24.04, then install all the CA 2.0 requirements, then install CA 2.0 over 1.8 and fire Apache2 back up (and keep my fingers crossed).

Alternately, back everything up, start with a clean 24.04 server, install CA 2.0, then restore everything from backup. That's clean, but I have to requisition a new server, requisition a machine name change, etc, and that'll all take longer and have it's own problems.

Any advice or experience with this?

seth

There isn't really a Catch-22. Update the OS, install PHP 8, install CA 2.0 over your 1.8 install and then run the database schema updates. That's all that's needed. You don't need to be running PHP 7 to update.

Just make a dump of the database before you do all of this, just so you know you have a safety net (you won't need it though).

scottcampbell

seth

I can work with that confidence!

I'll snapshot the whole system, backup the db, and give it a shot in the next few days. I'll report back.

behindicebergs

scottcampbell Hey Scott! Don't know if this helps, but I'm running an Ubuntu 20.04 release and CA 2.0 works normally. Obviously upgrading to a different OS is a choice you have to make on your own but I don't think it's completely necessary, I upgraded to PHP 8.2 and then to CA 2.0 and except for some issues with Pawtucket things are OK. Let me know if you need any help with this.
Cheers.

scottcampbell

Well, I'll be honest things haven't been as easy as promised with CA. Upgrading the system to 22.04 was required by my organization because it's End Of Life on security upgrades. That went okay. As did adding the ondrej/ppa to get PHP 8.2.

But dropping Providence 2.0.6 over 1.7 took over a day of testing, restore and try again. For whatever reason, every time I tried to login, it would fail and I'd get a redirect error in the app/log file. It was only when I though to try Providence 2.0.5 that it worked. I also got a few PHP failures when running caUtils upgrade-from-1-7 which left the database upgrade half complete and I'd have to start over with a restored database (tip: be sure to change SqlSearch to SqlSearch2 in app.conf). Now I have to figure out location history before I can try again on the production machine.

seth

How old was this system? We've been updating a number of early 1.7.x systems without issue. What were the PHP errors?

scottcampbell

Sorry, I didn't see the question until just now. Unfortunately, I don't remember the answers in detail. Here's my best recreation:

The redirect error went away after downgrading to 2.0.5. I'll try a more recent version at some point and report back. I think it was similar to this issue, where I was getting login errors in app/log like this:

2025-07-14 13:51:19 - INFO --> [LOGIN] Successful login for 'scampbell'; IP=10.36.248.92; user agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0 (Auth)
2025-07-14 13:51:19 - INFO --> [LOGF] Failed login with redirect for user id '' (/providence/index.php/Dashboard/Index); IP=10.36.248.92; user agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64
; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0' (AUTH)

(Now that I think of it, this happened again after I ran composer update, so I downgraded the vendor folder to the one distributed in the Providence zip file. See: https://support.collectiveaccess.org/d/302134-trouble-logging-in-after-upgrade-to-providence-209/3 So perhaps related to the problems with 2.0.6?)

I know some of the PHP errors were related to some older stuff in the app.conf file that needed to be brought up to date. SqlSearch definitely caused some of the problems unless I changed it to SqlSearch2. I found the error in my notes:

Fatal error: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is no longer supported in /var/www/html/providence/app/lib/Plugins/SearchEngine/SqlSearch.php on line 1110

The solution was go back a few steps. I think that also meant start over with a CA 1.7 database schema.

I have another note that upgrade-from-1-7 would sometimes have trouble completing the indexing from the command line. I did it probably five or six times in the course of testing and redoing things. But once logged into the website, I could redo the indexing and it would finish.

So, in the end everything was fixable, but not smooth as hoped. Still great software though, and much appreciated. We have a decade-old system with over 5000 items catalogued, and would recommend it to any small museum!

seth

If you had that SqlSearch file in place it means you had outdated code laying around. For a system that old it would be best to move the old install out of the way and install fresh. I would guess you just copied new files over old. We'll need to add a note in the readme to the effect.

Thanks for taking the time to report this.