Migrate Umbraco 7 Cloud project to Umbraco 8

This article will provide detailed steps on how to migrate an Umbraco 7 Cloud project to Umbraco 8.

Read the general article about Content migration to learn more about limitations and other things that can come into play when migrating your Umbraco site from 7 to 8.

Prerequisites

• An Umbraco 7 Cloud project running at least Umbraco 7.14
• Make sure Umbraco Forms data is set to be handled as content
  • See Umbraco Forms on Cloud for more details on how to check the setting
• A clean Umbraco 8.1+ Cloud project with at least 2 environments

Step 1: Content migration

• Clone down the Umbraco 7 Cloud project

• Run the project locally and restore Content and Media

• Clone down the Development environment from the Umbraco 8 Cloud project

• Copy ~/App_Data/Umbraco.sdf or ~/App_Data/Umbraco.mdf from the cloned Umbraco 7 project

• Paste the file into ~/App_Data on the clone of the Umbraco 8 project

• Open web.config from the Umbraco 8 project

• Locate the Umbraco.Core.ConfigurationStatus key

• Replace the value 8.1.x with the version your Umbraco 7 project is running - eg. 7.15.0

• Run the Umbraco 8 project locally

• The migration will need to be authorized - Cloud credentials is used for this

• Click Continue to start the migration
• When the migration is done, login to the backoffice and verify that everything is there

Step 2: Files migration

• The following files / folders needs to be copied into the Umbraco 8 project

  • ~/Views - do not overwrite the default Macro and Partial View Macro files, unless changes have been made to these
  • ~/Media
  • Any files / folders related to Stylesheets and JavaScripts
  • Any custom files / folders the Umbraco 7 project uses, that isn't in the ~/Config or ~/bin

• If Umbraco Forms is used on the Umbraco 7 project:

  • Copy ~/App_Data/UmbracoForms into the Umbraco 8 project

• Config files needs to be carefully merged, to ensure any custom settings are migrating while none of the default configuration for Umbraco 8 is changed

• Run the Umbraco 8 project locally

  • It will give you a YSOD / error screen on the frontend as none of the Template files have been updated yet

• Open CMD in the ~/data folder on the Umbraco 8 project

• Generate UDA files by running the following command: echo > deploy-export

• Once a deploy-complete marker is added to the ~/data folder, it is done

• Check ~/data/revision to ensure all the UDA files have been generated

• Run echo > deploy in the ~/data folder to make sure everything checks out with the UDA files just generated

• This check will result in either of the two:

  • deploy-failed
    • Something failed during the check
    • Run echo > deploy-clearsignatures followed by echo > deploy to clear up the error
  • deploy-complete
    • Everything checks out: Move on to the next step

Step 3: Setup custom code for Umbraco 8

Umbraco 8 is different from Umbraco 7 in many ways. This means that in this step, all custom code, controllers and models needs to be reviewed and rewritten for Umbraco 8.

Example of changes that needs to be made

One of the changes made, is how published content is rendered through Template files. Due to this, it will be necessary to update all Template files (.cshtml) to reflect these changes.

Read more about these changes in the IPublishedContent section of the Documentation.

• Template files need to inherit from Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoViewPage<ContentModels.HomePage> instead of Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage<ContentModels.HomePage>

• Template files need to use ContentModels = Umbraco.Web.PublishedModels instead of ContentModels = Umbraco.Web.PublishedContentModels

• @Model.Value("propertyAlias") replaces @Umbraco.Field("propertyAlias")

• @Model.PropertyAlias replaces @Model.Content.PropertyAlias

Depending on the size of the project that is being migrated and the amount of custom code and implementations, this step is going to require a lot of work.

Step 4: Deploy and test on Umbraco Cloud

Once the Umbraco 8 project runs without errors on the local setup, the next step is to deploy and test on the Cloud Development environment.

• Push the migration and changes to the Umbraco Cloud Development environment

• The deployment will result in either of the two:

  • deploy-failed
    • Something failed during the check
    • Run echo > deploy-clearsignatures followed by echo > deploy to clear up the error
  • deploy-complete
    • Everything checks out: The Development environment has been upgraded

• Transfer Content and Media from the local clone to the Development environment

• Test everything on the Development environment

• Deploy to the Live environment

Step 5: Going live

Once the migration is complete, and the Live environment is running without errors, the site is ready for launch.

• Setup rewrites on the Umbraco 8 site
• Assign hostnames to the project
  • Note that hostnames are unique, and can only be added to one Cloud project at a time

Related information

• Content Migration for Umbraco CMS - 7 to 8
• Issue tracker for known issues with Content Migration
• Umbraco 8 Documentation status
• Forms on Umbraco Cloud
• Working locally with Umbraco Cloud
• KUDU on Umbraco Cloud