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Upgrading

Written by Graham Brookins, Updated by Graham Brookins Maintainers: André Rømcke, Andrea Melo, Ricardo Correia, Bertrand Dunogier, Graham Brookins
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This section is the starting point for upgrading an Exponential installation. Find the version you run, follow the path for it, and finish with the checks at the end of each guide. The current line is Exponential 6.0: the newest release is 6.0.14 (7 June 2026), and 6.0.15 is in development on the main branch.

An upgrade is safe when the kernel was never changed: your own work belongs in extensions, in settings/override/ and settings/siteaccess/, and in your own designs. Changes made directly to kernel files, the shipped settings or the shipped templates are overwritten by an upgrade; move them into an extension or an override first.

Find your version

In the administration, Setup > System information names the version. On the command line, from the installation root:

php bin/php/console --version

The database records its version in the table ezsite_data (the row names ezpublish-version and ezpublish-release keep their historic spelling on purpose).

Choose your upgrade path

You run Follow
Exponential 6.0.0 to 6.0.14, or an earlier checkout of the 6.0.15 line Upgrading to 6.0 (part "From any 6.0.x")
eZ Publish 5.4, or 5.90 (2017.08 and later) Upgrading to 6.0 (part "From 5.4 or 5.90")
eZ Publish 3.10 up to 5.3 The database update chain up to 5.4 (Upgrading, part A), then Upgrading to 6.0
LoveStack (mugoweb/ezpublish-legacy) Upgrading, "Coming from LoveStack", then Upgrading to 6.0
eZ Publish 3.x or 4.x, step by step The version pages below, which keep the original procedures of those releases

eZ Publish was the predecessor of Exponential; its creator discontinued it, and Exponential continues its code. The upgrade pages of those years remain here as they were written, for sites that still have to climb that chain.

Always back up first

Take a backup of the database and of var/, settings/override/, settings/siteaccess/, extension/ and design/ before any upgrade, and restore it once on another machine to prove it works. Try every upgrade on a copy of the site before the live one. Backup and consistency checks explains the classic procedure; Upgrading to 6.0 gives the commands for every supported database.

The upgrade guides in the help center

The help center of every Exponential 6 installation carries the complete, maintained guides. They are also readable on this site:

Upgrade pages by version

Exponential 6.0

eZ Publish 5.x

eZ Publish 4.x

eZ Publish 3.x

Background for the classic releases

Getting help

Questions about an upgrade go to the Share Exponential forums; a bug goes to the issue tracker. For a production site on a deadline, 7x offers upgrade services. Getting Support lists every channel.

In this section

Contributors

Comments (2 historical)

Written by readers of the earlier documentation sites, kept as they were.

  1. Upgrading steps

    Betsy Gamrat ·

    These are the steps I have used to upgrade 4 complex eZ sites from 3.4 straight to 3.7.3.
    I created a new installation of eZ and put a copy of the old database under it. During the installation script I answered "Leave the database and do nothing".
    Create database
    Copy database from live site
    Install eZ
    Use eZ upgrade tool and phpMyAdmin to synchronize the old data to the new database structure
    Manually set the "container" flag on the custom classes and folders for the system (there is probably a script for this)
    Copy the templates from the live site, change ownership and permissions
    Update override.ini
    Copy any images
    Update template priorities
    Copy the stylesheets
    Clear all the caches
    Integrate new CMS into existing site
    The only odd thing was that the variable name $name didn't work well with 3.7.3 and I used $nname instead.

  2. permissions

    Greg McAvoy-Jensen ·

    For Linux users copying their own directories into the Exponential directories, it may be helpful to remember to either:
    - use "cp -p" to preserve permissions and ownership, or
    - run bin/modfix.sh after copying them
    to be sure permissions and ownership are set correctly.

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