Bringing an old install up to date

[lbarron]

Good day folks, I started a position with a new company a few months ago, and one thing that I inherited was an XAMPP install that's quite old...looks like 1.7.4 VC6 dated to September of 2011. It's a credit to the product that it's still running correctly and is actually used in some production capacity, but for security purposes if nothing else really needs to be brought up to date. One potential issue I know is that during the time since it was installed, MariaDB has replaced MySQL as the default database, but there might be other issues too.

As I have no experience with XAMPP beyond what I can read, I wanted to ask for advice here. What would be the best way to bring this install up to date? Should I just apply the updates up to where MySQL was still supported? Is there a way to move that over to MariaDB and continue to stay on the most recent release? I appreciate any help that you folks can offer.

[Altrea]

Hi,

I started a position with a new company a few months ago, and one thing that I inherited was an XAMPP install that's quite old...looks like 1.7.4 VC6 dated to September of 2011. It's a credit to the product that it's still running correctly and is actually used in some production capacity, but for security purposes if nothing else really needs to be brought up to date.

Please read the [INFO] How to not fail getting help here (Section: Scope of support)

What would be the best way to bring this install up to date?

The best way for a productive commercial environment would be:

• Install a second independend server (preferred a Linux OS)
• Install Apache, PHP, MariaDB, etc (whatever you need) as single components and configure them the way you need to fit your companies requirements
• Do a full backup of all the asset and database data of your current running old XAMPP environment
• Restore the backuped data on your new server
• Fix all incompatibility issues
• Just if everything is running smoothly on the new server start to replace the old server with the new server

Should I just apply the updates up to where MySQL was still supported?

XAMPP does not have an update procedure. Updating a XAMPP version does mean doing a fresh install and import the asset and database data.

Is there a way to move that over to MariaDB and continue to stay on the most recent release?

MariaDB will be your least frustrating problem, because MariaDB is to MySQL very much binary replacementable, especially the base functionality.
The very very more time consuming part would be updating the php scripts.