Back story, I have used Drupal since 6, had sites on 7 and currently have sites on 8. All were installed via cPanel and not composer or anything else.

Then I find that some newer versions of modules that I used in 8 require Composer to install and by the time you get much further you find nearly everything "requires" Composer to install. Oh it's easy, yeah right. So far not upgraded any of my 8 sites to 9, they are backed up but if they break that will be it, no going back. Drupal will lose so many people because it is too hard. I'm not going to learn anything else and I don't like Wordpress.

So I start to look into Composer, some really terrible youtube videos out there, all expecting you to know what they are dribbling on about and I don't. Finally I discovered I needed SSH access, I do, and something like Putty. So I installed Putty, followed the instructions, inserted webhost IP address and I get Putty Fatal Error. Network Error: Software caused connection abort. I've googled this and I'm no further forward. I, temporarily, turned off Wndows Firewall, but still nothing. Any ideas what is stopping this please.

I will at some point try to upgrade from 8 to 9, but it's something I need time and peace and quiet to do and I don't have that at the moment.

I do wish that Drupal would stop making this so much more complicated all the time.

Comments

timanderson’s picture

Is an SSH server running on the Drupal server?

I found I needed a second dev server when approaching the 8 to 9 upgrade, to try things out without breaking production.

Tim

youngros’s picture

"Is an SSH server running on the Drupal server?!" No idea what you are saying.

My hosting has SSH access and it is enabled, I can generate keys etc. I just can't get Putty to work.

I have two websites that are much the same. One is personal and a subdomain and I will try the upgrade on that, if it works I will try the other one. I don't have the time to do anything else. 

If I knew 4 years ago when I started the D8 sites that upgrading to 9 was going to be such an issue, I wouldn't have bothered.

timanderson’s picture

Maybe best to troubleshoot SSH access with your hosting provider, as it isn't about Drupal, then come back when sorted.

Tim

gisle’s picture

As you've discovered for yourself: Working with Drupal 9 and installing extensions without having access to the composer and the CLI on the host is a PITA.

The error reported by PuTTY: "Network Error: Software caused connection abort." don't tell you much. It may be to a misconfigured PuTTY. Can you use PuTTY against other remote servers?

However, if you run Windows 10 on your local computer, "ssh" is a built-in command, just fire up PowerShell and give one of these commands:

ssh mywebserver.com
ssh 127.127.127.127

(replace "mywebserver.com" or "127.127.127.127" with the name or IP-address of your webserver.

That is at least one less source of error.

Since your hosting has SSH access and it is enabled, I think we can assume that the ssh-server is running at the webserver. This is something controlled by your hosting provider (unless you have a private server where you are root, which I assume is not the case).

And yes, switching from a cPanel or tarball-based workflow to a composer-based workflow is hard (just read my comments in this forum from a few years back, when I were in your shoes). However, I think the switch was necessary for Drupal to survive. The good people behind Backdrop CMS don't agree, so if composer is really ruining your day, you may want to check it out.

However, the problem you now have, has nothing to do with installing Drupal. It's basically a hosting issue, where you've problems with remote access to the CLI on your webhost. If you can't resolve it through the forum, you need to seek support from your hosting provider.

- gisle

youngros’s picture

I tried with Powershell, in admin mode and got this result "kex_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset"

I will message the host to see if the problem is their end.

youngros’s picture

Hosting has enabled SSH, turns out it wasn't. A very quick response on that. So one problem sorted.

I have read this https://www.drupal.org/docs/updating-drupal/updating-drupal-core-manually, so that is probably my next job on one site to see what happens.

robertrocks2342’s picture

Thank you so much for raising your voice. I am also searching for any appropriate answer of it. 

Thanks

Jaypan’s picture

Here’s a tutorial on composer I wrote that may help. It’s slightly outdated but 95% good still. 
 

https://www.morpht.com/blog/drupal-and-composer-part-1-understanding-com...