Why not upload Concrete 8.5.5 in the UPDATE folder and start the update from the back office

Personally, having a server, I always duplicate the site and the database and I create a subdomain which points to the new version on which I apply this update. If all goes well, I point the domain to this new version and I keep the old one for a few days on the server, the time to make sure there are no hidden problems.

Some adjustments that can help avoid DB errors during updates (won't necessarily work for you)

- Turn off and then clear the cache
- Put Doctrine into development mode (dashboard search for 'Entities')
- Run the search index all job
- Run the update from the CLI

You could also swap the theme to Elemental during update and use my Extreme Clean addon to clean up first, so the update has minimal data to chew through (https://c5magic.co.uk/addons/extreme-clean... ).

However, as your issue is within Express, I suspect none of the above will help.

You may be able to trick it by manually making the equivalent table alteration, so the update doesn't have to. Or doing such may cause further complications :-(

what means the abbreviation 'CLI' in your hint 'Run the update from the CLI'? till now I used 2 ways of update routine: 1.) by replacing the concrete folder directly on the server of the provider; 2.) running the update routine through the dashboard of c5;
I speak german, do only sporadically website-work and english abbreviations this way are not very familiar to me, sorry

https://documentation.concrete5.org/developers/framework/console-commands-and-jobs/cli-commands

Thanks. Appreciate much your help.
Unfortunately I’m not really familiar with command-line-work, so there's the chance to make more damage than success ... I'll see, what I can do.
I will be back to give feedback, when I tried some things, but it will take some time ;-)

If you have shell access, an update is safe to run through the CLI. If you enter the command wrong, it will just complain about it. Its not like other commands where getting a parameter wrong can be disastrous.

That's quite reassuring :))

@Elstud and JohntheFish: Big sorry for giving no reply and sign of life all these days … :(
Somehow monitoring this thread didn’t work; I didn’t get an email telling me about your posts. Came back today occasionally and saw your posts, thanks! Will come back after trying some of your advices.

Here is what I tried, unfortunately (and as supposed) with no success so far:

With a backup of the live website running version 8.5.2 I installed it into a subdomain in order to run the trials in the subdomain, just in case something would break seriously, maybe even preventing to restore it out of the backup.

Following the advice before trying to update to version 8.5.5 everytime I turned off and cleared cache, put doctrine in development mode and ran the search index all job. Neither replacing the concrete directory directly through controlpanel PLESK, nor going through dashboard updating routine, nor running the update from the CLI worked. Everytime it threw the already known same error, see the attached screenshot of the CLI-log (20210418-c5-CLI-update-failure-log.png).

Reading the error message it seems to have to do something with ‚foreign keys‘ in the database. Without having read the whole release notes of version 8.5.3 I read by chance the last note of it saying ‚Add ForeignKeyFixer and c5:database:foreignkey:fix CLI command (thanks mlocati)‘. I had already thought before to try updating the versions ‚step-by-step‘, e.g. from the running 8.5.2 first to 8.5.3 and only then to 8.5.4 and further to 8.5.5. So I tried this too by replacing the concrete directory directly through controlpanel PLESK with version 8.5.3. It threw again the same error message, see the attached screenshot of the browser window depicting ‚version 8.5.3. / installed version 8.5.2‘ (20210419-c5-CLI-update-failure-screenshot.png).

So any other idea or suggestion is still very much appreciated, thanks.

Hi,

I raised PHP memory limit from 256 MB to 512 MB on the server ... the installation went through then.
Maybe it's worth a try.

Olaf

Hi Olaf, thanks for your input. I tried it, but it didn’t work. The error message is still the same. :-(

What still really annoys me is the fact, that the updates on another website with the same provider and server environment worked fine. So I thought, there MUST be a difference between the two websites, which causes the update process to break.
In fact, I have two add-ons on the website, where the update doesn’t work: Login/Logout Link (1.0) and Simple Gallery (1.0.7). Could that create the problem in updating the database, as the error message definitely points to a database problem?