chicken or egg??

[rangestech]

Hi team,

I'm hosting WHMCS on a cloudways server that's been at PHP 7.0 and ioncube 6.x for some time - I'm running WHMCS 7.4.2

I'm looking to update to the latest 7.6 version though I have some concerns with the procedure - do I update the server first to 7.2 and ioncube 10.x and perform a manual update of the WHMCS installation - or attempt the update of WHMCS first and then update the server??

Any guidance would be welcomed!

[brian!]

9 hours ago, rangestech said:

do I update the server first to 7.2 and ioncube 10.x and perform a manual update of the WHMCS installation - or attempt the update of WHMCS first and then update the server??

I doubt you could update WHMCS first without updating ioncube because v7.5+ needs v10.1.0 or later to work...

[rangestech]

I thought that might be the case - thanks I'll have a crack at a manual update

[WHMCS Marcus]

@rangestech Brian is correct here. You must meet all of the system requirements listed before attempting the update: https://docs.whmcs.com/System_Requirements

Ioncube v10.1 and beyond are backwards compatible, so you should be able to update to the System Requirements for v7.5 (with the exception of PHP 7.1 or PHP 7.2) and your current version will still run properly until at which time the upgrade could be performed.

[rangestech]

1 hour ago, WHMCS Marcus said:

@rangestech Brian is correct here. You must meet all of the system requirements listed before attempting the update: https://docs.whmcs.com/System_Requirements

Ioncube v10.1 and beyond are backwards compatible, so you should be able to update to the System Requirements for v7.5 (with the exception of PHP 7.1 or PHP 7.2) and your current version will still run properly until at which time the upgrade could be performed.

Thanks Marcus - I think the problem is that the automated cloudways update scripts don't separate the ioncube update from the PHP version upgrade - the new ioncube 10 version support comes when you upgrade to PHP7.2!

Hence the title of my request!

I've created a staging server instance so will try it there first - is there any way to get around the license not valid issue to keep my production system running whilst I update the staging clone? Does WHMCS have staging licenses?

[WHMCS John]

Hi @rangestech,

Yes we offer free development licenses to direct customers. Please open a ticket with Customer Service to request one: https://www.whmcs.com/submit-a-ticket/

[rangestech]

Thanks John, I'll do that right now, cheers.

[yggdrasil]

Correct, you need to first upgrade ioncube, otherwise the upgrade will not work. I did this recently and upgrading ioncube is very simple.

[rangestech]

Thanks everyone, I did a manual update after allowing the cloudways server to auto-update to 7.2 with ioncube 10.x - hopefully I won't get into this dependency conundrum again.

I did test the upgrade on a staging server first using a dev licence (thanks John and the support team) and all seemed to go well

It also gave me an opportunity to upgrade all of my addons and integrations to their latest versions as well

Slow and steady wins the race apparently... Happy camper.

[yggdrasil]

Indeed, the more complex the environment, the slower your upgrades/patches will be as you are required to test many things. This is why I'm not a fan of auto updates for a product like WHMCS. Since the softwares is targeted at the minimum to small businesses or tech related people, its normal for them to have plugins, addons, hooks, and many other things they need to test for compatibility.

As for IonCube don't worry. I was on a very old ioncube version before upgrading WHMCS, so this is not something you need to do frequently. Same for PHP. Most versions are supported in years time frames.