There’s a dilemma amongst system administrators of high-traffic servers when it comes to doing updates – downtime. Most upgrades on a Linux/cPanel server can be done without interruption, but when it comes to upgrading MySQL, some get quite a surprise.
Now, upgrading the release within a minor MySQL version (like 5.0.81 to 5.0.85) is pretty seamless. However, going from 5.0 to 5.1, or 5.1 to 5.5 is just as easy, but requires a little extra TLC to prevent PHP-driven websites from going down. Many administrators are unaware that upgrading MySQL on a cPanel server will break PHP. This is because PHP is compiled with the system MySQL libraries, and when MySQL is upgraded to a different minor version, the old libraries for that version are removed and replaced with the new ones. If PHP is compiled with MySQL support, it can’t execute because the libraries it’s looking for are now gone. The only way to properly fix this is to recompile PHP via EasyApache or downgrade back the version of MySQL you were running in the first place.
We’ve devised a simple way to run a MySQL upgrade without breaking PHP on your server. You will still need to run EasyApache to fully complete the upgrades, but this process will keep your websites running in the meantime. We’ve formulated the concept into an easy-to-read bash script that will do all the work for you.
You can download the script from our Github repo.
Update 2/14/14: Happy Valentine’s Day! I updated the script to work on cPanel 11.36+ and MySQL 5.6. I also added a –runeasy option to automatically invoke EasyApache after the upgrade.
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