How to upgrade PHP on a WordPress site on AWS Lightsail
by Muhammad in Uncategorized on February 22, 2023PHP have been speeding up the delivery of their versions significantly over the past 2 years. WordPress have introduced a flag on the administration section to warn users to upgrade because support for earlier versions is being suspended at a faster rate.
Improved PHP means a more secure, better performing WordPress framework which is great for users but upgrading PHP versions is proving challenging for WordPress webmasters.
In the blog we outline the options available for carrying out this action on AWS Lightsail:
Option 1:
Use our software to do it! Yes we may be biased but the simplest way to do this is to install our software on your WordPress site and complete the steps in this guide
Option 2:
- Access Lightsail and launch the available WordPress bitnami AMI
(Select the parameters e.g. name, size etc. as applicable in your case)
- 2: Create an S3 bucket in the same region as your Lightsail instance
- 3: On your source instance push all content from /wp-content/ to the bucket created in step
sudo aws s3 cp /opt/bitnami/wordpress/wp-content s3://{bucket-name}/wp-content –recursive
- 4: On the instance created in step 1, pull the contents of the S3 bucket into the /wp-content/ directory
sudo aws s3 cp s3://{bucket-name}/wp-content /opt/bitnami/wordpress/wp-content –recursive
- 5: On the source instance run this command to dump the database
sudo wp db export –add-drop-tables
- 6: On the new instance, run this command to import the database
sudo wp db import {database-name}.sql
- 7: Update the wp-config.php database parameters to your source instance credentials
- 8: Open in browser on allocated IP and review
- 9: Switch IP from your source instance to your new instance and install Lets Encrypt SSL
sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool
And you are done!
Please feel free to contact us if any of the above is unclear, we would be happy to help.
