Upgrading

This page explains in detail how to upgrade Moodle. For a summary of the process, see Upgrade overview.

Check the requirements

Check that your server meets all requirements for 2.7 in Administration > Site administration > Server > Environment.

Note: You can only upgrade to Moodle 2.7 from Moodle 2.2 or later. If upgrading from earlier versions, you must upgrade to 2.2 as a first step.

Before upgrading

We advise that you test the upgrade first on a COPY of your production site, to make sure it works as you expect.

Themes

All standard themes present in Moodle 2.6 (and earlier), except the Clean theme, have been removed from Moodle 2.7 (see MDL-43784). Custom themes and themes from the Plugins Directory are not affected, unless they use one of the removed themes as a parent theme.

For sites wishing to continue using standard themes (or themes relying on a standard theme as a parent theme), other than Clean, we recommend you use the following process.

1. Download the 2.7 version of Moodle, but do not run the upgrade yet.
2. Download the 2.7 version of your theme from the Themes section of the Moodle plugins directory (or from the links below) into moodle/theme/.
3. Proceed with the upgrade.

It is possible to copy missing themes into Moodle after the upgrade, but this should happen before users touch the system, otherwise theme-related settings may be lost.

The affected themes (with download links) are...

Afterburner	plugins db	github
Anomaly	plugins db	github
Arialist	plugins db	github
Binarius	plugins db	github
Boxxie	plugins db	github
Brick	plugins db	github
Formal White	plugins db	github
Form Factor	plugins db	github
Fusion	plugins db	github
Leatherbound	plugins db	github
Magazine	plugins db	github
Nimble	plugins db	github
Nonzero	plugins db	github
Overlay	plugins db	github
Serenity	plugins db	github
Sky High	plugins db	github
Splash	plugins db	github
Standard	plugins db	github
Standard old	plugins db	github

Note: Only installed add-on themes are updated automatically during the upgrade, NOT standard themes. Because standard themes have been removed from Moodle 2.7, they have to be re-added.

Questions engine upgrade

In Moodle 2.1, there was a major overhaul of the Question engine. As explained in the upgrade documentation for that version, it was possible to delay parts of the database upgrade to be run later. Before you upgrade to Moodle 2.7, this upgrade must be completed.

This will affect you if...

• your site started off on a version of Moodle 2.0.x and
• when you upgraded to Moodle 2.1 or 2.2, you made use of the complex facility to delay part of the question engine upgrade (as explained in the upgrade documentation for that version) and
• you still have not completing that upgrade

...then you must complete it before upgrading to Moodle 2.7.

You can check by looking at the bottom of the Environment page in your site, providing you are running a version later than 2.4.9, 2.5.5 or 2.6.2. If you have a problem, it will tell you there. If there is no mention of questions there, you can forget about this.

This is unlikely to affect most users.

Backup important data

There are three areas that should be backed up before any upgrade:

1. Moodle software (For example, everything in server/htdocs/moodle)
2. Moodle uploaded files (For example, server/moodledata)
3. Moodle database (For example, your Postgres or MySQL database dump)

See Site backup for more specific information.

Put your site into maintenance mode

Before you begin upgrading your site, you should put it into maintenance mode to stop any non-admin users from logging in.

Check for add-on updates

If you have Automatic updates deployment enabled, you will be able to update installed add-ons automatically during the upgrade. Just make sure you check for available updates (via the button for it) at the Plugins check screen.

If you are updating add-ons manually, it is a good moment now to check in the Moodle Plugins directory whether there is a 2.7 version available for any add-ons (including themes) that you have previously installed on your site. If so, download the add-on package. In the next step, you will copy it to the appropriate location in your Moodle code (see Installing add-ons).

The upgrade of the add-on will then happen as part of the Moodle upgrade process.

If an out-of-date add-on causes your upgrade to fail, you can usually delete the add-on code rather than uninstalling it from within Moodle so that the data associated with it is not deleted.

Install the new Moodle software

Standard install package

1. Move your old Moodle software program files to another location. Do NOT copy new files over the old files.
2. Unzip or unpack the upgrade file so that all the new Moodle software program files are in the location the old files used to be in on the server. Moodle will adjust SQL and moodledata if it needs to in the upgrade.
3. Copy your old config.php file back to the new Moodle directory.
4. As mentioned above, if you had installed any custom add-ons on your site you should add them to the new code tree now. It is important to check that you get the correct version for your new version of Moodle. Be particularly careful that you do not overwrite any code in the new version of Moodle.
5. Dont forget to also copy over your moodledata folder / directory. If you don't you will get a "fatal error $cfg- dataroot is not configured properly".

Linux

mv moodle moodle.backup
tar xvzf moodle-2.7.tgz

Next, copy across your config.php, any custom plugins, and your .htaccess file if you created one (check that custom plugins are the correct version for your new Moodle first):

cp moodle.backup/config.php moodle
cp -pr moodle.backup/theme/mytheme moodle/theme/mytheme
cp -pr moodle.backup/mod/mymod moodle/mod/mymod

Don't forget to make moodle/config.php (and the rest of the source code) readable by your www server. Ideally the files should not be writeable by your server.

If you use cron, take care that cron.php is executeable and uses the correct php command:

chmod 740 admin/cli/cron.php (some configurations need chmod 750 or chmod 755)
copy the first line from cron.php (if it looks like '#!/usr/local/bin/php' or '#!/usr/local/bin/php5.3', no need to copy '<?php')

if necessary.

Using Git

You can use Git for updating or upgrading your Moodle. See Git for Administrators for details.

Command line upgrade

On Linux servers, Moodle 2.7 supports running the upgrade from the command line, rather than through a web browser. This is likely to be more reliable, particularly for large sites.

Finishing the upgrade

The last step is to trigger the upgrade processes within Moodle.

To do this just go to Administration > Site administration > Notifications.

Moodle will automatically detect the new version and perform all the SQL database or file system upgrades that are necessary. If there is anything it can't do itself (very rare) then you will see messages telling you what you need to do.

Assuming all goes well (no error messages) then you can start using your new version of Moodle and enjoy the new features!

Note: If you are running multiple servers then you should purge all caches manually (via Administration > Site administration > Development > Purge all caches) after completing the upgrade on all servers.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded...

If your server uses a main language other than English, you may encounter a 'Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded' when you try to upgrade it. You can increase max_execution_time = 160 on php.ini to allow the scripts enough time to process the language update. Otherwise, you can switch to English as the default language before doing the upgrade and back to your original language after a succcessful upgrade. See the forum discussion at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=119598.

After upgrading

The config.php file from your installation should work fine but if you take a look at config-dist.php that came with Moodle 2.7 there are more/different options available (e.g. database drivers and settings). It's a good idea to map your old config.php settings to a new one based on the 2.7 config-dist.php.

Assignments

The old assignment (2.2) module has been removed from core and has been replaced by a stub to support transparently remapping URLs and restoring course backups from the old module to the new one.

If you are still using the old assignment (2.2) module, after upgrading to Moodle 2.7 all assignment (2.2) activities will be hidden. You need to run the Assignment upgrade tool to un-hide the activities.

If you really, really need to keep using the old assignment (2.2) module, you should update the code to Moodle 2.7, and then replace the "mod/assignment" folder with the one from https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-mod_assignment/releases before completing the upgrade.

Possible issues that may affect you in Moodle 2.7

Items to be added here...

Moodle 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6 improvements

Depending on which version you are upgrading from, please see the section 'Possible issues that may affect you' in the documentation

• Upgrading to Moodle 2.3
• Upgrading to Moodle 2.4
• Upgrading to Moodle 2.5
• Upgrading to Moodle 2.6

See also

• Using Moodle Installation problems forum
• Moodle 2.7 release notes
• Upgrade API