Upgrading cPanel from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 with Elevate

Upgrading cPanel from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 with Elevate

If you are currently using CentOS 7 + cPanel, cPanel is no longer providing updates. There is a process entitled 'Elevate' to upgrade your system to AlmaLinux 8 (CentOS is no longer supported by cPanel). Elevate is supported and recommended by cPanel.

In preparation to run Elevate however, there are a number of things that must be done:

1. You must be running MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.3 or higher.

If you are running older versions, you upgrade in WHM -> MySQL Upgrade. If you are running older CMSs you may need to disable STRICT mode on MySQL to ensure websites still function, WHMCS has a good article on doing this at: https://help.whmcs.com/m/installation/l/678317-disabling-mysql-strict-mode

If you need help please contact us and we will disable STRICT mode (this needs to happen after the upgrade). Note that modern updated CMSs should all support MySQL 8 with STRICT mode ENABLED, so if all your sites are updated properly you will not need to do this.

2. AlmaLinux 8 and the latest cPanel versions only support PHP 7.2 or higher (See: https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/360062821973-What-versions-of-PHP-are-available-in-EasyApache-4-on-AlmaLinux-8-and-RockyLinux-8-#:~:text=These%20versions%20of%20PHP%20are,PHP%205.6 ). This means before you upgrade your should ensure all your websites are running PHP 7.2 or higher. This is done in WHM -> MultiPHP Manager

3. If you have PostgreSQL installed (this is a custom installation and not installed by default in cPanel installations), this will block the upgrade. You should do an SQL dump of all data first, remove PostgreSQL, then after the upgrade reinstall PostgreSQL and import the SQL dump. If you have not manually installed (or requested us to install) this will not be on your server and you will not have to worry about this.

4. Any repositories that are not default cPanel / CentOS 7 repositories (EPEL is okay) you may have added will need to removed. This is because those repositories would be for version 7 of CentOS and will not be valid after upgrading to AlmaLinux 8.

5. Before you begin the actual upgrade we highly recommend to take a snapshot in the VPSBlocks My Account portal. This is important as if there is an issue you can easily rollback to the server state before you began.

Once you have done those things you can run Elevate. This will take between 45 minutes and 2 hours. Once Elevate is run, disable STRICT mode if necessary as per instructions in step 1, and check your websites. They should all function as normal.