Forum offline after host upgraded to PHP 8

[ssolstad]

HI,

My forum is offline after our host upgraded to PHP 8. The forum was unfortunately not upgraded to a version supporting PHP 8 so the site and admin are now offline.

How can this be solved?

[Jim M]

You will need to perform a manual upgrade to the latest release so that you can get your community back up and running. You can read how to do that here: 

 

[ssolstad]

I have uploaded all files as described, but upgradig will not start. 

I get the message: www.xxx is currently unable to handle this request

This is basically the same message as I got prior to uploading all files manually.

 

[Jim M]

This sounds like a 500 Internal Server Error. Please contact your hosting provider as you will need to provide the Server Error log entry for this issue before we can assist further.

[ssolstad]

I've done that. I'll get back to you as soon as I hear back from them.

[Stuart Silvester]

You can also upload the requirements checker to your server, load it in a web browser and it'll tell you if there's anything missing from your PHP configuration.

Make sure you delete it after using it.

[ssolstad]

I have downgraded the PHP to 7.4.33 and tried to start the upgrade and run the requirements checker.  I get the message 

• You are running PHP version 7.4.33. You need PHP 8.0.0 or above. You should contact your hosting provider or system administrator to ask for an upgrade.

 When upgrading to 8.1 the upgrade fails and gives the same error as before.

 

Then I downgraded to 7.4 again and I'm able to access the admin panel. When stying to start the upgrade i get the following message:

1C287/2 You are running PHP version 7.4.33. You need PHP 8.0.0 or above. You should contact your hosting provider or system administrator to ask for an upgrade.

I have not bothered to try to upgrade to 8.1 at this stage, I expect I'll run into te same issues again...

In both cases is seems like upgrading the PHP as requested should solve the issue I'm having, it it something I'm missing here?

 

[Randy Calvert]

Run the requirements checker when running PHP8 to make sure you’re not missing any required modules. (PHP has MANY different components. A required module may be missing in your PHP8 install.)

if it meets all of the requirements and is not working you need to look into the Apache error logs for why. That’s something you will need to work with your host on. 

[ssolstad]

Uploaded the checker and ran it, with no issues:

 

PHP Requirements

• PHP version 8.1.14.
• cURL extension loaded
• DOM extension loaded.
• GD extension loaded.
• Multibyte String extension loaded.
• MySQLi extension loaded.
• OpenSSL extension loaded.
• Session extension loaded.
• SimpleXML extension loaded.
• XML Parser extension loaded.
• XMLReader extension loaded.
• XMLWriter extension loaded.
• Zip extension loaded.
• Exif extension loaded.
• You do not have the GMP PHP extension loaded. While this is not required for general use, it is required if you wish to use Web Push Notifications. You may wish to contact your hosting provider or system administrator to ask for it to be installed or consider switching to Invision Cloud Community which has Web Push Notifications enabled.
• 256M memory limit.
• No Suhosin restrictions.

Error messages are as follows (PHP 8.1):

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Undefined constant "�true�" in /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/conf_global.php:265 Stack trace: #0 /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/system/Settings/Settings.php(56): require() #1 /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/system/Patterns/Singleton.php(41): IPS\_Settings->__construct() #2 /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/system/Http/Url.php(771): IPS\Patterns\_Singleton::i() #3 /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/system/Http/Url.php(248): IPS\Http\_Url::baseUrl() #4 /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/system/Request/Request.php(276): IPS\Http\_Url::createFromString('https://www.lrf...', true, true) #5 /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/system/Log/Log.php(106): IPS\_Request->url() #6 /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/init.php(1034): IPS\_Log::log('Error: Undefine...', 'uncaught_except...') #7 [internal function]: IPS\IPS::exceptionHandler(Object(Error)) #8 {main} thrown in /home/5/l/lrforum/forum/conf_global.php on line 265

 

 

[ssolstad]

Got it running and upgraded!

Seems like there was an error with the config_global file. Changing this with a backup file did the trick at least, have no idea why...

[Mark H]

Line 265 of your conf_global.php file was corrupted with some non-ASCII characters at the word 'true'.

$INFO['sql_utf8mb4']             =     ÔtrueÕ;

That line is added as part of the utf8mb4 data conversion. If you've actually completed that step, the line is needed.

Just remove those two Ô characters from the line.