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Upgrades

Keeping CiviCRM up-to-date helps you take advantage of new features and is critically important when security updates are issued.

In general:

  • The upgrade steps differ depending on your CMS.
  • The upgrade steps are the same no matter which versions of CiviCRM you are moving from and to (with some exceptions).
  • The steps are the same for small upgrades (e.g. 5.49.0 to 5.49.1) and large upgrades (4.7.31 to 5.49.0).
  • You can make big jumps in one upgrade (e.g. 4.7.20 to 5.49.0) without applying all the upgrades in between.
  • If you are starting from a version prior to 4.5.9, upgrade to 4.7 as an interim step. The latest version does not contain upgrade code going back that far.

This page covers steps before and after an upgrade. For the upgrade itself, follow the CMS-specific page in this chapter.

Before upgrading

  1. Ensure that your system meets all the requirements for the CiviCRM version to which you are upgrading.
  2. Check for any version-specific upgrade instructions.
  3. Backup your site. Very important!
  4. Use your backup to create a copy of your site (directories and database), and ensure that it works correctly. This tests your backup and restore procedure and gives you a low-stakes environment for testing the upgrade.
  5. Test the upgrade process on your copied site to ensure that it succeeds.
  6. Troubleshoot any upgrade problems.
  7. Once the test upgrade succeeds, apply the same steps on your live site.

Upgrading

The steps vary depending on your CMS. Find the appropriate page in this chapter and follow its steps.

After upgrading

Flush caches

If you ran the upgrade on the command-line, flush caches by running cv flush. The upgrade web interface does this automatically.

Evaluate new permissions

The CiviCRM post-upgrade messages should alert you if new CMS permissions are added. If so, review and configure the CMS permissions.

Update resource settings

If you ran the upgrade in a different directory from your previous version, you may need to update the configured CiviCRM Resource URL and Extension Resource URL settings. Missing icons and images, or problems with javascript functions and stylesheets, are symptoms that these settings need to be updated.

  1. Go to Administer CiviCRM » System Settings » Resource URLs.
  2. Refer to the field help on that screen for instructions.

Update system workflow message templates

If users have customized system workflow message templates, merge their customizations with CiviCRM's template changes for each version upgrade.