This Magento upgrade tutorial will help guide you through the process of updating / upgrading your Magento installation from 1.4+ to 1.9.4.5, which was the final release of Magento 1.x back in May 2020. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will assume you have access to SSH on your hosting account. Please be sure to obtain updated files from the authors of any Magento extensions you have installed on your website.
You should always create a backup of your entire Magento 1.x installation before proceeding with an upgrade. Never perform these steps on a live store without testing on a staging installation first. If you need help performing website maintenance on your store, please consider hiring a professional service.
Here is the rough process to follow when attempting to upgrade to the latest version of Magento 1.x over the command line. Please only attempt this if you are experienced in server management, platform upgrades, and web development. The process may need to be modified to fit your specific hosting environment.
Related: Upgrade to the latest Magento 2 version, if you are already on Magento 2.
Upgrading to Magento 1.9.4.5 with Command Line
1.) Change to your Magento installation directory:
(swap “username” below for your account’s username, or change the entire path to match your absolute URL)
cd /home/username/public_html2.) Download Magento 1.9.4.5 from https://github.com/OpenMage/magento-mirror/releases
3.) Upload the archive to the base folder of your Magento installation
4.) Extract the archive, using one of the following commands:
tar -zxvf magento-1.9.4.5.tar.gz
unzip magento-1.9.4.5.zip5.) Change to the directory created during extraction:
cd magento6.) Turn off file replacement prompts:
unalias cp7.) Copy the Magento 1.9.4.5 files over your existing files:
cp -rf * ../8.) Change back to your Magento installation directory:
cd ..9.) Remove the empty folder
rm -rf magento10.) You are done! Please feel free to run the following commands if you need to update file permissions and ownerships.
Optional: CHMOD all files to 644:
find -type f -name '*.*' -exec chmod 644 {} \;
Optional: CHMOD all folders to 755:
find -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
Optional: CHOWN all files/folders:
chown -R username:username *Learn this easy trick to remove leading and trailing spaces from cells!