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I have a live website I created in Laravel 4.2. I use Git and have been pushing changes to a private Github repo. The live site is on Digital Ocean, where I also have a staging droplet, which is automatically updated when I push to Git.
It's about time I started to upgrade my site to 5.1 and am just wondering what the correct way to go about doing this is, so I can keep the commit history. (This isn't totally necessary, just a nice to have).
It it a case of:
git checkout -b laravel5-upgrade
Deleting the L4.2 directory structure (leaving the Git files/folders alone) and doing a fresh install of L5.1 and follwing the upgrade instructions here: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/upgrade#upgrade-5.0.
and then merging back into master?
Or is it safer just to start from scrach with a totally new git repo? What is your experience of upgrading?
Both methods are fine, it might be easier to start from scratch but I wouldn't have thought it would make a huge difference. If you want to keep your commit history you wouldn't loose anything by giving it a try. If it all goes completely wrong you can revert it back and try again.
Thanks for the reply. I think I'm going to start from scratch and see how it goes. As you said, I can revert back if there's any problems...
Dont forget packages dependencies. Some packages require laravel 5.1. In production run only composer install, not update.
Good point. Cheers @helmerdavila
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