Automatic InterWorx 7 to InterWorx 8 Upgrades

General Interworx Control Panel Info News & Announcements
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Automatic InterWorx 7 to InterWorx 8 Upgrades

InterWorx 7 recently reached Maintenance Only status . Public support for InterWorx 7 will end on December 31, 2026.

Because of this, we will be rolling out automated InterWorx 7 to InterWorx 8 upgrades for customers on EL8 servers. These automated upgrades will occur July 6-9, 2026.

Note: The automated upgrade will only occur for our external customers. Liquid Web and Nexcess customers’ servers will be upgraded at a later date.

Automated update rollout procedure and timeline

  • April-May 2026: InterWorx version 7.14.4 will include a banner in NodeWorx, alerting Server Admins about the automatic upgrades

    • This banner will only be shown in NodeWorx, and only to the Server Admin user and secondary NodeWorx users. It will not be shown to SiteWorx users or resellers

    • As we have a weekly release schedule, the ETA for the progression of 7.14.4 will be as follows:

      • Beta: Week of April 20
      • Release Candidate: Week of April 27
      • Release: Week of May 4
      • Stable: Week of May 11

    • Depending on the server configuration, the banner will include the following information:

      • Vanilla EL8 servers: The server will automatically upgrade to InterWorx 8, the week of July 6th, 2026
      • EL7, CloudLinux, Litespeed, and clustered servers: The automatic upgrade to InterWorx 8 is not supported for the server.

  • July 6-9, 2026: Servers that meet the criteria to automatically upgrade to InterWorx 8 will do so

  • July 13, 2026: If the automatic update to InterWorx 8 failed, or could not complete, the banner in NodeWorx will change to inform the Server Admin, with instructions to contact InterWorx support

What actions should be taken?

  • For most servers, no action is needed. On the date your server is scheduled to upgrade, if all of the pre-flight checks pass, the server will automatically upgrade to IW8 as part of the daily cron
  • If you would like more control over updating from IW7 to IW8, we recommend using the in-place upgrade tool, prior to July 6th: Upgrading from InterWorx 7.x to InterWorx 8.x — InterWorx documentation
  • Customers that are using CloudLinux, Litespeed, or clustering, or are still on an EL7 OS, will not receive the automatic upgrade to InterWorx 8
    • EL8 CloudLinux, Litespeed and clustered servers will need to migrate to a supported version before InterWorx 7 reaches EOL status on December 31, 2026.
    • As public support for EL7 ended at the beginning of this year, those servers must be migrated to a supported environment, immediately

Things to know:

The automatic upgrade to InterWorx 8 will include the following new features:

Other Notable Changes:

  • Horde is no longer a webmail option, as it does not support the new internal PHP version of PHP 8.2
  • Webalizer was removed as a statistics option

Troubleshooting

As mentioned above, there is a pre-flight checklist that is addressed before the upgrade to IW8 occurs. All of these items must pass in order for the upgrade to run. These items are:

  • The httpd syntax is error free: If there are any syntax errors in Apache confs or vhosts, this will fail
  • LiteSpeed is not enabled: This upgrade cannot occur on Litespeed servers. Litespeed will either need to be disabled, or the accounts will have to be migrated to a server with IW8 installed
  • CloudLinux is not enabled: This upgrade cannot occur on servers running CloudLinux. Those accounts must be imported to a new server with IW8 installed
  • The server is not part of a cluster: This update cannot occur on clustered servers. Clustering either has to be disabled/removed or accounts will need to be migrated to new servers with IW8 installed
  • Yum dry run: This checks to make sure that yum is up and running
  • The server is up to date: This makes sure that the server is up to date
  • Server is running EOL OS version: This checks to make sure that the server is on a supported OS. The update to IW8 will not work on EL7 servers. If this fails, accounts must be migrated to a new server with IW8 installed. Supported OSes can be found here: What are the system requirements of InterWorx Control Panel? — InterWorx documentation
  • Server is using Dovecot Submission: Servers using courier for port 587 cannot be updated to IW8. The Dovecot MSA must be in use. Information on how to check if the Dovecot MSA is in use on the server, can be found here: Dovecot and php-intl required for Roundcube 1.5.3

If, on July 13th, the banner states that the upgrade to InteWorx 8 could not complete:

  • Check the Preflight Checklist for any triggered flags

    • Navigate to Server > Software Updates
    • At the very bottom of the page is a section called Major Version Upgrade. Click Go to Updates Page. That will take you to the Preflight Checklist.

  • If the preflight checklist does not show any triggered flags, check to make sure that the daily cron ran between July 6-9

    • The timestamp on ~iworx/var/last_daily indicates the last time the daily cron successfully completed. Example:

       [root@server ~]# ls -la ~iworx/var/last_daily
 -rw------- 1 root root 0 April 13 18:43 /home/interworx/var/last_daily
 [root@server ~]#

    • If the timestamp on that file indicates that the daily cron did not successfully run during that time, further information about the cron failure may be found in ~iworx/var/log/cron.log

If you have any questions, or run into any issues, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at https://support.interworx.com. We will be happy to assist. :slight_smile:

Thanks,
-Jenna
Friendly Neighborhood InterWorx Support Manager