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Upgrade a self-managed server

Firefly III can upgrade itself from very old versions, even back from 4.7.x. In some cases the upgrade process is destructive. It will remove transactions, delete accounts or clean up data.

Warning

Always make a backup of your database and storage before you upgrade, especially when you upgrade major versions.

Created using composer "create-project"

The best way to upgrade is to use the "Straight from GitHub" instructions below. In recent times, the deployment of Firefly III has changed and the "create-project" method is no longer recommended.

Straight from GitHub

Upgrading by pulling the remote repository

It's no longer possible to upgrade Firefly III by pulling the code from the main or develop branch of the repository. Generated (JS) code and other dependencies are not in the repository, so your upgraded installation may not work as expected.

v6.4.9 is the latest version.

It is up to you, if you prefer the tar.gz file or the zip file.

Validate the downloaded archive

Optionally, you can validate and test the integrity of your download by also downloading the SHA256 checksum file.

With this SHA256 checksum file, you can verify the integrity of the download by running the following command:

# Should return: "FireflyIII-v6.4.9.zip: OK"
sha256sum -c FireflyIII-v6.4.9.zip.sha256
sha256sum -c FireflyIII-v6.4.9.tar.gz.sha256

# alternative command:
shasum -a 256 -c FireflyIII-v6.4.9.zip.sha256
shasum -a 256 -c FireflyIII-v6.4.9.tar.gz.sha256

Move the old installation

Move the old installation to a temporary directory, ie firefly-iii-old. Example commands:

# moves the entire installation to a backup directory.
# this also serves as an impromptu backup of your installation
mv /var/www/firefly-iii /var/www/firefly-iii-old

Extract the archive

Extract the archive with the new release wherever you had installed Firefly III. In this example, it is /var/www/firefly-iii, but it could be anywhere. To do this over the command line, use the following command:

# The destination directory can be changed, of course.
mkdir /var/www/firefly-iii
unzip -o FireflyIII-v6.4.9.zip -x "storage/*" -d /var/www/firefly-iii

# a tar.gz alternative:
mkdir /var/www/firefly-iii
tar -xvf FireflyIII-v6.4.9.tar.gz -C /var/www/firefly-iii --exclude='storage'

Exclude the storage directory

When unpacking, make sure you do not overwrite the storage directory. That's why the -x "storage/*" and --exclude='storage' part is important. It prevents the default storage directory from being extracted. You will overwrite it anyway from the old installation directory.

Copy over files from the old version

Copy the .env file and the entire storage folder from the old installation to the new one. Example commands:

# copy the .env file
cp /var/www/firefly-iii-old/.env /var/www/firefly-iii/.env

# copy the storage directory
cp -r /var/www/firefly-iii-old/storage /var/www/firefly-iii

Run upgrade commands

Run the following commands to upgrade the database and the application:

php artisan migrate --seed
php artisan cache:clear
php artisan view:clear
php artisan firefly-iii:upgrade-database
php artisan firefly-iii:laravel-passport-keys

Restore file permissions

Use sudo if necessary, but if you do, make sure that you set the ownership of the /var/www/firefly-iii directory to www-data again:

# The destination directory can be changed, of course.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/firefly-iii
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/firefly-iii/storage

Alternatives

GitHub user @igoptx has created this script that can do the upgrade automatically. Please use this at your own risk.