Upgrade from Craft 2 to Craft 3

Get ready

First of all, please read the official upgrade guide: docs.craftcms.com/v3/upgrade.html. Use that as your main source, your general guideline and single source of truth. Like with all our install guides, we assume you have a local development running where you will do most of the hard work. If not, see here. Also, as you will be using two Apps on fortrabbit, check out our multi staging article for general concepts.

About the changes in Craft 3

Craft 2 was way more simple. Craft 3 is different in many ways, modern and much more powerful. Just the way we like it: configuration with dotenv files, new directory structure, Composer based workflow and good Git support.

Why to update Craft 2 to Craft 3

Craft CMS 2 is not supported by Pixel and Tonic any more. Craft CMS 2 is also not compatible with PHP 8. For PHP 7.4: End Of Live is November 2022. More and more hosting providers such as fortrabbit will stop supporting PHP 7.4.

What about Craft 4

By the time of this writing, Craft 4 is already out. But Craft 3 is still supported. We suggest to update to Craft 3 first, since it's an easier path and more plugins are available. Do the Craft 3 to Craft 4 update later.

We also offer have an upgrade guide for that.

Upgrade path

Approach this like you're building a new Craft 3 site. Make use of all the new features. Have a fresh start and a clean installation. Then import the contents from your old installation. This is your route:

1. Locally

The hard work is done in your local development environment:

1. Start a new Craft 3 project from scratch in a new folder
2. Import your templates, configs and contents from the old folder

So, at the end of this — ideally — you have two versions of your project/website running locally in parallel: the one based on Craft 2, and the new one on Craft 3. Both with the same content and probably the same look, but with a different engine.

2. On fortrabbit

On your fortrabbit production environment you are replicating your local workflow by creating two parallel versions:

1. Create a new App in the Dashboard.
2. Deploy code with Git and rsync the assets from your new local Craft 3 version to your new fortrabbit App.
3. Once you have two versions running locally and on fortrabbit smoothly, remove the domain from the old App running on Craft 2 and add it to the new App running on Craft 3. Check out our general migration guide on how to switch seamlessly and without downtime.
4. After the domain switch is done, you can now safely delete the not needed Craft 2 fortrabbit App.

Don't worry about costs here too much. Remember that fortrabbit Apps are billed on a daily basis. So it will not burst your budget, when you have two Apps running here for a few days. And please don't hesitate to contact us when you hang somewhere.

Further readings

There are other good articles on how to best update from Craft 2 to Craft 3:

• Upgrad­ing from Craft 2 to Craft 3: Update Every­thing on Craft 2 by Ben Parizek
• Migrating a Craft 2 site to Craft 3 by Michael Westwood at Honcho