Upgrade hanging on unpack - taken site offline

[Washerhelp]

Latest upgrade hung at download and unpack. My forums are showing "Update in progress". A full restore didn't bring them back. If I remember right there are some files installed somewhere for the failed update that need deleting but I can't find them?

Edited October 13, 2022 by Washerhelp

[Washerhelp]

I've completely deleted everything in my forums folder. And restored all the files from a backup - but forums are still offline, showing update in progress. I don't know how that's even possible? I've checked on different devices, so it's not my browser cache. How do I get off of the update in progress page urgently please?

[Washerhelp]

Sorry for multiple posts, but as you can imagine it's pretty urgent when site goes offline. I just tried logging back into control panel and got a message that an upgrade was already in progress and it would have to complete before I could access dashboard.

I click the button to complete upgrade, but it failed. However, whatever it did got my forums back online. I now have things back to normal with the message in control panel that Version 4.7.3 upgrade is needed. However, I clearly am not going to try that again.

Can someone please tell me (and others) how to recover from a failed update? This has happened to me before a few years ago, and I remember tech support told me to find the update files and delete them, but I can't remember where they are?

Also, can you please build in a way to abort a failed update? There is no cancel button. If an update fails or hangs, we need to be able to tell it to abort the update, clean up the update files, and remove the "sorry this forum is being updated" message. Currently, any update that fails, for whatever reason - leaves forums offline.

 

[Marc]

Yopu need to upload a fresh set of files from your client aea, then run the upgrade from /admin/upgrade . If you are then still havign issues, please let us know and we can take a closer look. Please dont restore parts of the site to try and recover. If you needed to recover it would be all files and database. I realise you are in a rush to get things back online at present, but you may actually prolong the issue doing what you are doing at present. 

[Washerhelp]

Thanks Marc. I did delete every file and restored them all. But the site still showed it was updating. Do you agree that it's not ideal for users to be confronted with a failed update and have their site go offline with no obvious way to restore it?

Anyone experiencing this would have a lot of stress whilst they try to find out what to do, which is all manual downloading and running things manually. Would it be possible to have an option to abort, clean up and put things back when an update has not run at all? Also, it would be extremely useful if the update process could give error reports?

I just found the following in error logs

 

Error: Failed opening required '/home/customer/www/washerhelp.co.uk/public_html/forums/admin/upgrade/upgrading.html' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php81/pear') (0)
#0 /home/customer/www/washerhelp.co.uk/public_html/forums/system/Dispatcher/Dispatcher.php(110): IPS\Dispatcher\_Front->init()
#1 /home/customer/www/washerhelp.co.uk/public_html/forums/index.php(13): IPS\_Dispatcher::i()
#2 {main}

....public_html/forums/init.php(1029): IPS\_Log::log('Error: Failed o...', 'uncaught_except...')
#1 [internal function]: IPS\IPS::exceptionHandler(Object(Error))
#2 {main}

[Marc]

Just now, Washerhelp said:

Thanks Marc. I did delete every file and restored them all. But the site still showed it was updating. Do you agree that it's not ideal for users to be confronted with a failed update and have their site go offline with no obvious way to restore it?

There is a way to restore. You would restore all files and folders, and  the database. What you have done here is restore 50% of the components,w hich would leave your site offline longer to your users. 

 

 

1 minute ago, Washerhelp said:

Anyone experiencing this would have a lot of stress whilst they try to find out what to do, which is all manual downloading and running things manually. Would it be possible to have an option to abort, clean up and put things back when an update has not run at all? Also, it would be extremely useful if the update process could give error reports?

As its 'unexpected' there would be no way in which to do this. Quite simply, if we knew it was going to happen, it wouldnt happen. As a self hosted customer you would be expected to take care of full backups of your site and restore in full should there be issues.

It does need to be noted here, you were responded to within 30 minutes, and we are trygin to assist you. You havent been left an excessive amount of time here.

As I mentioned above, you need to upload a fresh set of files from your client area. Once you have done this, please visit /admin/upgrade to complete the upgrade procedure. It looks like you are missing something here

[Washerhelp]

Hi Marc. You are missing the point that the upgrade never started. It hung on download and extract. There was nothing to restore because I knew that nothing had been changed. The upgrade file never ran. 

I only restored my files after deleting all previous files because I needed to get rid of the file that was taking my site offline and showing users the site was bej g upgraded. 

What I wanted to know is which files are telling the system that an upgrade is in process so I would just need to delete them. This happened several years ago and tech support said I just needed to delete the upgrade file and that did the trick. 

[Marc]

I have confirmed this with a developer, and you need to either upgrade, or you need to restore completely. Its not as simple as removing a file any longer unfortunately. I fully understand what you are asking there, however the solution isnt what you are requesting, and may actually break your site. Upgrade tables can be written even if there has been an issue with extraction. 

Please could you also update FTP details so we can confirm why the extraction process failed?

[Washerhelp]

Thanks Mark. I appreciate it's potentially complicated to try and "catch" failures, and probably impractical to try and undo changes once the upgrade process has started if it fails.  I knew that the upgrade file had not run because it hung on the download and extract section, and never got to "installing". My problem was that the upgrade process puts a forum into maintenance mode pretty early on in the process, before its really started the actual upgrade.

So this resulted in my forum being stuck in maintenance mode, when no changes had started.  I was hoping you'd be able to provide an easy method to take a website out of maintenance mode. I know this happened several years ago but of course there have been many changes to Invision forum since then so maybe things are different now.

 

[Marc]

Im not sure what else I can really add there. There is no other way than what I have mentioned above. 

57 minutes ago, Washerhelp said:

I knew that the upgrade file had not run because it hung on the download and extract section, and never got to "installing".

As mentioned, this may actually be an incorrect statement.

[Washerhelp]

Ok Marc. Sorry that I'm not understanding. I'm just going on the premise that you have to download the file, unzip it, and then run it. So it hangs on the extraction section, and my error logs show that the file failed to run, then I have expected that no changes could have happened. But if you are implying that something else might have gone on in the background before the upgrade file was downloaded then fair enough. Many thanks for your help.

.

Edited October 13, 2022 by Washerhelp

[Marc]

That is indeed the case, yes. Please let us know if you have any issues once you have upgraded