Update and upgrade checklist

Before you continue, to avoid errors during your installation or update, make sure you verify all of the following:

• You set up a file system owner and shared that owner’s group with the web server user group
• Your cron jobs are set up and running
• Set a value for DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE
• File system permissions are set properly

Do not continue without performing these checks. Failure to do so could result in errors.

Set a value for DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE

Magento 2.3 includes security enhancements that require some data to be converted from serialized data format to JSON encoded format. This conversion occurs during the upgrade and it can take a long time, depending on how much data is in your Magento database.

The following tables are affected the most:

• catalogrule
• core_config_data
• magento_reward_history
• quote_payment
• quote
• sales_order_payment
• sales_order
• salesrule
• url_rewrite

If you have a large amount of data, you can improve performance by setting the value of an environment variable, DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE. By default, it’s set to a value of 50,000.

To set the variable, enter the following command as the file system owner in a bash shell prompt:

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export DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE <value>

For example,

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export DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE 100000

After your upgrade completes, you can unset the variable as follows:

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unset DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE

DATA_CONVERTER_BATCH_SIZE requires memory; avoid setting it to a very large value (approximately 1GB) without testing it first.

File system owner and group

The file system owner group must have write access to Magento directories and files.

Cron jobs are running

Magento requires three cron jobs, all running as the file system owner.

To verify your cron jobs are set up properly, enter the following command as the file system owner:

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crontab -l

Results similar to the following should display:

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* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/magento2/bin/magento cron:run | grep -v "Ran jobs by schedule" >> /var/www/magento2/var/log/magento.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/magento2/update/cron.php >> /var/www/magento2/var/log/update.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/magento2/bin/magento setup:cron:run >> /var/www/magento2/var/log/setup.cron.log

Another symptom of cron not running is the following error in the Admin:

To see the error, you might need to click System Messages at the top of the window as follows:

For details, see Set up cron.

File system permissions

For security reasons, Magento requires certain permissions on the file system. Permissions are different from ownership. Ownership determines who can perform actions on the file system; permissions determine what the user can do.

Directories in the Magento file system must be writable by the file system owner’s group.

To verify your file system permissions are set properly, either log in to the Magento server or use your hosting provider’s file manager application.

For example, enter the following command if the Magento application is installed in /var/www/html/magento2:

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ls -al /var/www/html/magento2

A sample result follows:

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total 1028
drwxrwx---. 12 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:55 .
drwxr-xr-x.  3 root         root     4096 May 11 14:29 ..
drwxrwx---.  4 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 app
drwxrwx---.  2 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 bin
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache 439792 Apr 27 21:23 CHANGELOG.md
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   3422 Apr 27 21:23 composer.json
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache 425214 Apr 27 21:27 composer.lock
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   3425 Apr 27 21:23 CONTRIBUTING.md
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  10011 Apr 27 21:23 CONTRIBUTOR_LICENSE_AGREEMENT.html
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache    631 Apr 27 21:23 COPYING.txt
drwxrwx---.  4 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 dev
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   2926 Apr 27 21:23 Gruntfile.js
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   7592 Apr 27 21:23 .htaccess
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   6419 Apr 27 21:23 .htaccess.sample
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   1358 Apr 27 21:23 index.php
drwxrwx---.  4 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 lib
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  10376 Apr 27 21:23 LICENSE_AFL.txt
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  30634 Apr 27 21:23 LICENSE_EE.txt
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache  10364 Apr 27 21:23 LICENSE.txt
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   4108 Apr 27 21:23 nginx.conf.sample
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   1427 Apr 27 21:23 package.json
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   1659 Apr 27 21:23 .php_cs
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache    804 Apr 27 21:23 php.ini.sample
drwxrwx---.  2 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 phpserver
drwxrwx---.  6 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 pub
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   2207 Apr 27 21:23 README_EE.md
drwxrwx---.  7 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 setup
-rw-rw----.  1 magento_user apache   3731 Apr 27 21:23 .travis.yml
drwxrwx---.  7 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 update
drwxrws---. 11 magento_user apache   4096 Jun 13 16:05 var
drwxrws---. 29 magento_user apache   4096 Jun  7 07:53 vendor

Here,

• most of the files are -rw-rw----, which is 660
• drwxrwx--- = 770
• -rw-rw-rw- = 666
• the file system owner is magento_user.

To get more detailed information, you can optionally enter the following command:

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ls -al /var/www/html/magento2/pub

Because Magento deploys static file assets to subdirectories of pub, it’s a good idea to verify permissions and ownership there as well.

For more information, see File system permissions and ownership.