Knowledgebase
How to update Magento using the Connect Manager
In this article we'll outline the steps for upgrading Magento with the built-in Connect Manager:
- The first thing you have to do any time you perform an upgrade is to make sure that you have a backup of your site (both of the files on your hosting account and of the database).
- Log in to the admin panel of your Magento, flush the cache from System>Cache Management and then disable it. If you use the compiler, disable it from System>Tools>Compilation.
- Then access the Connect Manager. You can do that either from the admin panel by going to System>Magento Connect>Magento Connect Manager, or by using the URL yourdomain.com/downloader (provided that the homepage of your site is yourdomain.com).
- In the Connect Manager leave marked the checkbox for Put store on the maintenance mode while installing/upgrading and mark the checkbox for Clear all sessions after successful install or upgrade (it's unmarked by default).
- After that click on the button Check for Upgrades. Then in the list with the core and third party extensions that are under the button find Mage_All_Latest and from its drop-down menu select the new Magento version.
- Then click on the Commit Changes button that's at the bottom of the page to start the upgrade process.
- Wait for a few minutes until there's no more activity in the command-line window and click on the Refresh button that's under the window. If this causes an Internal Server Error, the reason for this is most likely incorrect file and folder permissions (messed up during the upgrade process). You need to set the permissions of all the files of your Magento to 664 or 644 and those of the folders to 775 or 755.
- Before you can access the frontend and backend of your site you need to delete the file maintenance.flag from the root Magento directory on your Magento hosting account.
- Then log in to the admin panel and reindex the data from System>Index Management.
- Enable the cache from System>Cache Management. If you use the compiler you can enable that too from System>Tools>Compilation.
For some more details you can also check out the tutorial on how to upgrade Magento with Magento Connect Manager.
You can also upgrade Magento via SSH. For more information check out the tutorial on how to upgrade Magento via SSH.