How to Upgrade Magento Version from 2.3.X to 2.4.0?

Magento 2.4.0 is released. As per release notes, it contains 98 new features, 50 security changes, support of 2FA in admin by default, and PHP 7.4 support. As a store owner or as a developer, you should never miss this crucial upgrade. Today we will see step by step guide to upgrade Magento version from 2.3.x to 2.4.0.

If you are running on Magento version 2.2.x then you should first upgrade it to 2.3.x by following this guide.

Preparing Your Site for Upgrade

1. Make sure your server is configured to work with PHP 7.4. Magento 2.4.0 officially support only PHP 7.4. Though you can install Magento 2.4.0 with PHP 7.3 but it is not tested. So it is recommended to use PHP 7.4 with Magento 2.4.0. You can check your PHP version by running below command
   

   php -v

2. Make sure your composer is pointing to correct PHP version 7.4. You can check your composer’s PHP version by running below command
   

   composer -vvv about

3. Make sure your server has installed and configured Elasticsearch 7.6.x. Magento 2.4.0 does not support MySQL as a catalog search engine. You can check your Elasticsearch version by running below command
   

   curl -XGET ‘http://localhost:9200’

   OR

   curl -XGET ‘http://YOURDOMAIN:9200’

4. Take a code and database backup. Many developers are already managing their code in git. For them, an only database backup is important as they can revert the code from git if the upgrade goes wrong.

Upgrade Magento Version from 2.3.X to 2.4.0

Step 1: If you are directly performing the upgrade on your live site then first put your site into maintenance mode by running below command.

php bin/magento maintenance:enable

Step 2: If you are performing the upgrade on your local system then you can skip step 1 and start with step 2.
Take a backup of the composer.json

cp composer.json composer.json.bak

Step 3: Install the Composer update plugin

composer require magento/composer-root-update-plugin=~1.0 --no-update

composer update

Step 4: Update composer.json file with latest version. In our case, it is Magento Version 2.4.0. Navigate to your Magento 2 installation root path and run below command

composer require magento/product-community-edition=2.4.0 --no-update

Step 5: Run below command

composer update

This command will take some time to finish. This command will actually download all the required packages and upgrade your Magento version from 2.3.x to 2.4.0. After this command finish, run below commands

Step 6: Clear cache and regenerate code.

php bin/magento cache:clean

rm -rf var/cache/*

rm -rf var/page_cache/*

rm -rf generated/code/*

php bin/magento setup:upgrade
 
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
 
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f

Step 7: Disable maintenance mode

php bin/magento maintenance:disable

Note: Remove update directory from your root folder as update directory is not a part of Magento 2.4