Updating TP on test site causes failure on live site

[@rjen]

After reading your original post again I suspect I know what went wrong. It is not a TinyPortal issue but an SMF thing.

When you move SMF you need to run repair settings. This is needed to update the settings file to hold the database name and password to the new database and update the file paths in the database.

However, and this is not well documented, you need to run repair settings TWICE.

The first time to change database and password. Save it, and the second time to change the file locations .

If you do not do that the copied install will still refer to the main site file locations and uninstalling a mod on the copy will actually remove the sources from the main site!!!

[North East Man]

Many thanks @rjen - I’ll be giving it another go over the weekend and see how it goes.  Fingers crossed!!

[North East Man]

We’ll, the test run of uninstalling TP 1.5.1 and installing the current version on the Test site went very smoothly- no issues whatsoever on either the test site or the live site.  That was relief as I had been putting off the upgrade.  However despite the site looking OK on the surface and seeming to perform OK, switching the test site to PHP 7.4 created so many errors - approx 20 errors for each post on the forum, so I have dropped it back to 7.3. 

There are also issues with the live site in starting the migration to 2.0.18 - missing elements that could not be found by the upgrade.  But these are SMF issues rather than TP so will raise a query on their forums.

Thank you both tino and @rjen for your help with this.

[tino]

We’ll, the test run of uninstalling TP 1.5.1 and installing the current version on the Test site went very smoothly- no issues whatsoever on either the test site or the live site.  That was relief as I had been putting off the upgrade.  However despite the site looking OK on the surface and seeming to perform OK, switching the test site to PHP 7.4 created so many errors - approx 20 errors for each post on the forum, so I have dropped it back to 7.3. 

There are also issues with the live site in starting the migration to 2.0.18 - missing elements that could not be found by the upgrade.  But these are SMF issues rather than TP so will raise a query on their forums.

Thank you both tino and @rjen for your help with this.

SMF 2.0.19 fixed a lot of issues with SMF and PHP 7.4 so it might be worth updating to that first.

However TinyPortal 2.1.0 will run on SMF 2.0.17 without issue also if you wanted to get that updated on your live site. At the very least I would suggest jumping to TinyPortal 1.6.9 as there were some security bugs discovered in TinyPortal versions less than 1.6.6