By StephanP on

At the time that Drupal 7 came out did work it out to upgrade/migrate my Drupal 6 website to Drupal 7.
During the attempts I actually managed to break my Drupal 6 website and that was the end of it.
Now I'm facing the webhost migration of a Drupal 7 website and while Drupal 8 is out for quite some time, I figured let's also try to upgrade to D8.
But again, after having spend many hours I have to admit that it's beyond my capabilities.
It'd appear to me that there's no semi-smooth upgrade path from D7 to D8.

So, I'm actually interested if there are any detailed "how to" success stories of D7 upgrades to D8?

For what it's worth, here's what I've been trying:

  • Following the instructions Migrating a site I manually exported my database from MySQL Admin and downloaded the /sites/default/files folder structure using FTP
  • I also used module Backup an Migrate to do the same semi-automatically
  • Following Preparing an upgrade, I created a new empty database at the new website host
  • Next I Uploaded Drupal 8 plus the Backup and Migrate module using FTP
  • After the initial setup I tried importing the backup database
    • First using the migration user interface ("website/upgrade")
    • When this appeared to fail (not a single page or node imported), I tried to restore the previously stored database using the Backup an Migrate module. Again, with no resulting node or user.
    • All the migrate_upgrade error messages that were issued are beyond me. Not a clue what to do with these.

Apparently it's all not that straigthforward to migrate and upgrade a D7 website to D8.
So I'm no going to attempt a host migration keeping D7. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Edit: Well, this I was able to establish. D7 website successfully migrated to the other host

⋅ Categories: Drupal 8.x

Comments

Alan D.’s picture

Alan D. commented

I got a fairly painless upgrade from a super simple Drupal 6 to 8 site using 8.1.x about 9 months back, but trying today under 8.2.x seems completely broken beyond belief.

Menu items failed
Content types failed
Views, no migration path (as per 8.1.x)
Content was (even with no valid content types)
- broken images & files.
- no migration path for the old References CCK (as per 8.1.x)

Very hard to debug anything, various non-descriptive like "Cannot read from non-readable stream". A guzzle error that was not caught and explained, etc (file systems were perfectly setup). I'd guess that this was the root cause that resulted in 0 byte files with random hashed filenames in the migrated content. Just one of the many non-descriptive errors logged.

But with 5 content types and 22 published items, I can't justify spending too much time debugging this! It is a worry for sites with 10,000+ items to migrate!

Alan Davison