Upgrade Interworx 6 to 7 using Litespeed

General Interworx Control Panel Info
1

Hi,

I ran the pre-flight checks and got the “LiteSpeed is not enabled” failed…

That raised a few question:

  • Do Interworx 7 still have the Litespeed plugin ?
  • Do I need to disable the plugin or uninstall Litespeed for the pre-flight check to pass ?
  • Can I still use Litespeed with Interworx 7 ?

Thanks!

2

Hello–

  1. Yes, IW7 has a Litespeed plugin
  2. I would not at all recommend disabling the plugin to false-pass the preflight check. I have no idea the ramifications of doing so, but I can’t imagine they would be good.
  3. Yes, you can use Litespeed with IW7.

You will need to spin up a new server and migrate if you want to use Litespeed with IW7–the in-place upgrade tool with Litespeed is untested, which is why it fails that check, per our documentation: Upgrading from InterWorx 6.x to InterWorx 7.x — InterWorx documentation

If you submit a ticket to support.interworx.com, we can provide you a demo key to facilitate the migration.

Thanks,
-Jenna
Friendly Neighborhood InterWorx Support Manager

3

Hi Jenna!

Thanks for the reply!

… however I wasn’t expecting to being told I can’t do the in-place upgrade :frowning:

Do you know if the devs are planning to test and support it? If you have a plugin I would assume I’m not the only one using Litespeed :wink:

4

Hello–

Honestly, I think in the last seven years I’ve been with the company, you’re only the 10th or so person I’ve come across using Litespeed with InterWorx. It’s not a huge crossover of customer base. :frowning:

The in-place upgrade tool currently cannot be used on clusters, either, so Litespeed use is not the only limitation.

I’m talking to the devs now about this, though–did the pre-flight mark any customized vhosts? Or did it just fail on the Litespeed plugin being enabled?

Thanks,
-Jenna

5

Oh! okay! I’ve worked with Litespeed on cpanel often and when I migrated I saw that Interworx was one of the “supported panel”. I’ve assumed you had a larger customer base using it! Dosen’t matter that much tough, it’s working and that’s the most important :wink:

For the pre-flight checks, I had a few domains marked, but at first glance it was only minor modification that can be easily changed. I also had a custom theme, but I really don’t care deleting it! I ended up managing most of my customers… they wanted a “self-service” but they prefer calling and pay … go figure!

6

Hello–

It talked to one of the devs who worked on the upgrade tool, and he said, as long as there were not any unexpected vhost customization/modifications (which that one check would flag), there should not be any real issues doing the upgrade, since the new vhost template system in IW7 is compatible with Litespeed.

So again, it is not fully tested on our end, so ‘do at your own risk disclaimer’–but it should be okay as long as you clean up the couple mods that were marked so the vhost check flag gives you a pass. You would then click Ignore next to the Litespeed flag.

If you do try the upgrade and run into any issues, just submit a ticket to support.interworx.com.

Thanks,
-Jenna

7

That sounds like a good news!

As it’s an OpenStack instance, I will probably clone and test before I do it on my production instance.

I will contact support if I have any issues upgrading, and I will update this post if one of the other 9 customer wants to update!

8

News from the upgrade! (yes, already!)

This is not a tutorial, but how I did my upgrade. Follow at your own risk!
People of the future: The following have been written on January 14th, 2022 and might (will probably) be outdated when you read it

TL; DR

  1. As per your best practices: Backup
  2. Stop Litespeed from:
    a) the “web server” page in Nodeworx
    b) the CLI with systemctl stop lsws
  3. In the plugin page (In Nodeworx submenu), disable the Litespeed plugin
  4. Start Apache from the “web server” page in Nodeworx
  5. Go to “software updates”, verify the pre-flight checks for 7.x and fix the failed checks if necessary

If you want to be on the stable channel for 7.x

  1. Go to “software updates” and select the beta channel to update to 6.12.1
  2. Update to 6.12.1
  3. Go to “software updates”, make sure the pre-flight checks are still “passed” and opt in for 7.x on the desired channel.
  4. Update to 7.x
  5. Sit back and relax!

If you don’t care to be on the beta channel for 7.x

  1. Go to “software updates”, make sure the pre-flight checks are still “passed” and opt in for 7.x (the only channel available will be beta).
  2. Update to 7.x-beta
  3. Sit back and relax!

The full story

I changed my mind and decided not to clone my instance to test the upgrade. Yes, you heard (read…) correctly!

image
image600×759 77.2 KB

Disclaimer: you should do what’s your common sense and the best practice s told you to do! Not a random dude from a forum who’s not afraid of a server crash :crazy face:

First, I’ve created an image to have a quickpath to roll back (I’m not that silly! Have you really thought I was that reckless? :wink:)

Afterward, I’ve stopped the Litespeed sever from the web server page in Nodeworx and disabled the Interworx Litespeed plugin. Doing that fixed 99.9% of the vhost customization error showed in the preflight checks.

Then, to minimize the downtime, I’ve started Apache and then I tested my sites. The first thing I notice … you are doing a great job to make my life easy! Everything was working like if I just did a “systemctl restart httpd” … at this moment, I was impressed!

I’ve continued in the preflight checks and deleted my custom theme. Now the only thing that wasn’t green was the “opt in”. Easy? Yes … and no … I’ve scratched my head a bit when I realized that I was only able to upgrade to the Beta channel …

So, I went to the changelog for the version 6 and saw in 6.12.1 that you’ve added the option to upgrade with any channel we wanted! Great! I’ll update to 6.12.1 before and job done!!! … wait … not so fast! 6.12.1 is only in BETA! Yikes… I had to question myself: to beta, or not to beta… … So, to make sure I was able to easily get back on a stable channel for the production state, I decided to go with the 6.12.1 in beta to upgrade to the stable channel for 7.x

So, I changed for the beta channel, updated to 6.12.1 and opt in for 7.x with the stable channel! Wow! That was easier done than said and was pretty easy to say!

:exclamation::face_with_monocle: Wait :question: … Am I done ?! … :open_mouth: … yes …

Conclusion

About time! … Yes, I know

The update went nearly flawlessly. I decided to update the OS and fix some changes I made in the past in some config file before the upgrade. Those parts, sometime, did not go well, but, as the preflight checks did not flag anything, so I’ve omitted those parts of the story on purpose.

Thanks to the Interworx team to make it easy to upgrade! I don’t remember when was the last time I was able to upgrade a product without a headache!

1 Like
9

Thanks for that great breakdown of everything you did! :slight_smile: I’m glad it worked out well for you, and that is useful for us for any other customers using Litespeed.

Regarding the IW7 beta channel–Due to the holidays, we haven’t released any new betas for a little while, but we did promote current releases. The most recent being 7.8.1, which was actually moved to Stable a few days ago. So you ended up upgrading to the same version, anyway, ironically enough, since the only IW7 version in all channels right now is 7.8.1. :slight_smile:

6.12.1 also was moved to Release Candidate that same day (I just had not had a chance to update the changelog, yet).

Again, thanks for such a thorough breakdown, that was really nice of you to take the time to share. :slight_smile:

10

You’re welcome!

IW’s user community seems to be less active or less chatty than the “other popular panel” community, but it’s up to us to make that change :slight_smile:

… or maybe it’s because the users have less thing to complains … :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: