Contao 3.5 to 4.4 Upgrade Failure (Fixed with workarounds)

Update: I was finally able to install with some workarounds. See details in the 4th post down (when it gets approved)

I tried a test upgrade from contao 3.5 to 4.4 as it appears 4.4 LTS is released. However, I ran into a lot of problems:

• The contao manager passes all the checks, but when I try and install anything, I get "Out of Memory" error. Googling it to find a lot of others have this, but the only answer is to change ISP.
  
• I installed manually. When running the install tool, I got a "command is already running" error. Googled it and found a lot of others have this, but no clear solution. I finally edited AbstractLockedCommand.php to change the lock file name to get around it.
  
• I finally got it up and upgraded my 3.5 webpage. But no extension manager. Googled again and discover the extension manager has been depreciated and we now have to use the beta contao manager to install extensions. But it doesn't work for me... I could find no clear instructions on how to manually install extensions in contao 4.4.
  
• I started to check out how the web page survived the upgrade. All images were broken. I can click on them and re-select the image in the files dir, but there are several 100 that need fixing.
  
• When I try and look at the web page, it is a blank page (really blank.... about:source shows nothing).

The backend looks great in 4.4, but my current status is that I can upgrade to it, but will lose all extensions and will have to re-build the web page from scratch or spend hours trying to fix all the individual problems with it. With 3.5 LTS support ending soon, I seem to be stuck in a trap.

Is 4.4 LTS really released as it appears on contao.org? Even the documentation is missing many of the 4.4 specifics (it still shows the extension manager). I really like contao and have been using it for years. However, if I can't upgrade before security fixes for 3.5 stop....

Cheers,

Allen

Just an update for others who may be having these problems:

• "command is already running" error: It seems contao:install-web-dir is broken in its handling of lock files. If you want to delete everything and start the install again, you have to find and delete the lock files or edit AbstractLockedCommand.php to use a different lock file name.
  
• Empty Web page or missing css after import from 3.5: Go into each webpage layout for the theme and click save (no need to make any changes). Do the same for any custom css. This fixed the problem for me.
  
• All image files broken after import from 3.5: I fixed this by moving my files dir into the contao root dir and adding a symlink in the web/ dir to it. This MUST be done before running the install tool.

I would really like to know how to install extensions without the contao manager. I'm not the only one that is limited to 256M (why does it require so much RAM?). I tried installing with composer, but the contao standard edition appears stopped at 4.4.7 and I had no luck installing an extension with composer after installing the managed edition.

Do you have shell access?

Just an update: I finally managed to upgrade my two production websites.

Four work-arounds I had to use:

• I had to use php-cli instead of php to run the composer
• I had to move the install directory temporarily to another location every time I re-ran the composer to install an extension (to get around the contao:install-web-dir lock problem).
• I had to add the files link in the web directly after the install
• In Maintenance->PurgeData, avoid selecting everything. The "Recreate the symlinks" sometimes deletes the files link (and possibly other custom linkes such as piwik).

Basically what I did was:

Code:

---

> php-cli composer.phar --no-dev create-project contao/managed-edition ./contao '4.4.*'
> mv contao temp1
> cd temp1
> php-cli ../composer.phar require madeyourday/contao-rocksolid-slider:^2.0
> cd ..
> mv temp1 temp2
> cd temp2
> php-cli ../composer.phar require terminal42/contao-changelanguage
> cd ..
> mv temp2 contao

---

And then run the installer to configure database, etc.