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How to upgrade a Umbraco v4 website to the latest version of v7

Why upgrade to v7?

A few months ago, I was asked to work on upgrading a Umbraco v4 (4.5.1) project to the latest version of v7 (7.15.10). 

My first reaction was to question the requirement as v7 is fast approaching its End of Life, in the end, I realised that the client simply didn't have the budget for a v10 upgrade, hence, my colleagues and I started working on a solid plan as this was still a big upgrade. 

Solid plan

When we did our research to see if anybody had written anything about the upgrade path from v4 to v7, we didn't find much except this good blog post. This was a very old article, but the explanation made sense. So, we decided to follow a similar approach. 

We created a new feature branch, and for each upgrade work, we created a new branch of this feature branch and then created PRs from those upgrade branches into this feature branch. After doing the code reviews, we merged each upgrade branch into this same feature branch.

After going live, we merged this "parent" feature branch into develop and main.

In terms of database upgrades, we used a copy of the live database for the dev upgrades. Once the upgrades were complete, we did our deployments to our testing environments, and simply restored the testing environments' databases from our dev database. Once the tests were complete, we did a deployment to our Pre-live environment and restored the Pre-live database from the dev database again. We then let the client create some additional content on the Pre-live website and when things were ready, we did a deployment to live and restored the live database from the Pre-live database. 

With its approach, we eliminated all the big risks for the database upgrades. This saved us a lot of time as well as possible headaches. (I just couldn't see another approach as this was still a big upgrade and database upgrades were potentially very problematic otherwise.)

Upgrade from v4.5.1 to v4.5.2

It is more difficult to do the very old Umbraco upgrades as there are no NuGet packages but DLLs and zip folders. Luckily, Lee Kelleher has this website that he uses to keep old Umbraco Archive Releases. We downloaded the zip files and did a minor upgrade to see if things were still looking good, and it worked!

Upgrade from v4.5.2 to v4.6.1

We followed the same manual approach until we had our first Umbraco NuGet package. At every step, we made sure we created back-ups. 



 









First Umbraco NuGet package and upgrade from v4.6.1 to v4.7.2

Our aim was to start using NuGet packages as soon as possible and v4.7.2 was the first available NuGet package. After our first NuGet package installation, we got rid of all the lib/Umbraco DLLs.

Following v4 upgrades

Following upgrades were v4.7.2 to v4.8.1, v4.8.1 to v4.9.0, v4.9.0 to v4.11.10. 

Each time we used NuGet packages, did our tests and code reviews, merged our changes into our feature branch, and carried on with a new feature branch off the main feature branch. 

Upgrade from v4.11.10 to v6.0.0

As you might know, Umbraco v5 had a lot of issues, hence Umbraco simply abandoned this version. As a result, the next step was to upgrade to the first version of v6. In order to keep things less risky, we first moved our project to 6.0.0.

Upgrade from v6.0.0 to v6.2.6

The next step was to upgrade to v6.2.6. After this point, it was time for v7.

Upgrade to v7.3.8

v7.3.8 was our first v7 version after v6.2.6. We continued doing our tests and fixed some minor issues. 

Following v7 upgrades

The following upgrades were v7.3.8 to v7.4.4, v7.4.4 to v7.5.15, v7.5.15 to v7.6.0 and v7.6.0 to v7.7.0. We did our package upgrades as normal and tried not to change anything else as much as possible. 

Finally v7.15.10 upgrade

The final step was to upgrade from v7.7.0 to v7.15.10 as we didn't see any big risk for this. After fixing a few WebForms-related errors, things were finally ready for the QA tests. 











QA Tests and live deployment

After the tests were complete, we did a deployment to Pre-live for the client to do their final tests as well as their additional content creation. 

Once they were done, we deployed the latest code to live and restored the live database from a Pre-live database backup. This way, we didn't have to worry about the live database upgrades!

After the live deployment, we saw the following error on one of the live website instances and fixed it with this small connection string change. 










Final thoughts

It was a nice experience to lead this Umbraco upgrade project. 

We didn't experience any big problems with our approach, this was due to our solid plan and great Development Team. 

As there are quite a few Umbraco v4 projects lying around, and there aren't a lot of articles about how to upgrade these old Umbraco projects, hopefully, this article will be helpful to some others. 











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