Migrate from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 8 Locally

This article provides detailed steps on how to migrate a Umbraco 7 Cloud project to Umbraco 8 locally.

Taking your Umbraco CMS project from Umbraco 7 to 8 is called a migration as it requires that the data is migrated in the process. This article covers each step involved in this process.

Read the Migrate Content to Umbraco 8 article to learn more about limitations and things related to migrating your Umbraco site from 7 to 8.

It is no longer possible to create a new Umbraco 8 project directly in the Umbraco Cloud portal. This article only covers migrating a project from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 8 locally. Depending on your goal, choose one of the following paths:

• Migrate and upgrade locally, then deploy: Follow this guide to migrate the Umbraco 7 project to Umbraco 8 on a local setup. Once the site runs on Umbraco 8 locally, continue through the upgrade path to a supported version locally. Only then create the Umbraco Cloud project and deploy to it.
• Rebuild on a new version: If you're rebuilding the site on a new version and only want to carry over content and schema, use the Import/Export guide. This only migrates entities that Deploy supports, so custom database tables and Umbraco Forms entries are not included, and only draft and published content versions carry over, not full version history.

Video tutorial

You can find the full playlist here: Migrate an Umbraco Cloud project from 7 to 8

The video tutorial was recorded when Umbraco 8 projects could still be created directly in the Cloud portal. The overall migration steps still apply, but set up the Umbraco 8 project locally as described below.

Prerequisites

• A Umbraco 7 Cloud project running the latest version of Umbraco 7.
• Make sure Umbraco Forms data is not handled as content.

  • See Umbraco Forms on Cloud for more details on how to check the setting.
• A local Umbraco 8 project running the latest version of Umbraco 8.

Step 1: Content migration

1. Clone down the Umbraco 7 Cloud project.
2. Run the project locally and restore Content and Media.
3. Set up a Umbraco 8 project locally.
4. Install the ProWorks Umbraco 8 Migrations community package on the local Umbraco 8 site.
5. Copy ~/App_Data/Umbraco.sdf or ~/App_Data/Umbraco.mdf from the cloned Umbraco 7 project.
6. Paste the file into ~/App_Data on the local Umbraco 8 project.
7. Open web.config from the Umbraco 8 project.
8. Locate the Umbraco.Core.ConfigurationStatus key.
9. Replace the value with the version your Umbraco 7 project is running.
10. Run the Umbraco 8 project locally.
11. Authorize the migration. Cloud credentials are used for this.

Authorize upgrade

1. Click Continue to start the migration.
2. Log in to the backoffice and verify that everything is there once the migration is complete.

If your login does not work, try the following approach:

Copy the UsersMembershipProvider attributes from your Umbraco 7 web.config file to the Umbraco 8 web.config file. Once you've done this, try to login again.

Below is an example of how the attribute can look:

<add name="UsersMembershipProvider" 
     type="Umbraco.Web.Security.Providers.UsersMembershipProvider, Umbraco" 
     minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" 
     minRequiredPasswordLength="8" 
     useLegacyEncoding="true" 
     enablePasswordRetrieval="false" 
     enablePasswordReset="true" 
     requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" 
     passwordFormat="Hashed" />

This is only a content migration. The database will be migrated, but updating view files, custom code, and implementation is a manual process.

See Step 3 of this guide, for more details.

Step 2: Files migration

Before moving on to the next step, make sure that the Umbraco 8 project is no longer running.

The following files/folders need to be copied into the Umbraco 8 project:

• ~/Views - Do not overwrite the default Macro and Partial View Macro files, unless changes have been made to these.
• ~/Media.
• Any files/folders related to Stylesheets and JavaScripts.
• Any custom files/folders the Umbraco 7 project uses, that aren't in the ~/Config or ~/bin.
• ~/App_Data/UmbracoForms - In case, Umbraco Forms was used on the Umbraco 7 site.

Merge the configuration files carefully to ensure any custom settings are migrated while none of the default configurations for Umbraco 8 is overwritten.

Generating UDA files

1. Run the Umbraco 8 project locally.

   • It will give you an error on the frontend as none of the Template files have been updated yet.
2. Open the command line tool in the ~/data folder on the Umbraco 8 project.
3. Generate UDA files by running the command: echo > deploy-export.

   • Once a deploy-complete marker is added to the ~/data folder, it is done.
4. Check ~/data/revision to ensure all the UDA files have been generated.
5. Run echo > deploy in the ~/data folder to make sure everything checks out with the UDA files that were generated.

Running the echo > deploy command will generate a new marker. Move forward with the migration based on the marker:

• deploy-failed

  • Something failed during the check.
  • Run echo > deploy-clearsignatures followed by echo > deploy to clear up the error.
• deploy-complete

  • Everything checks out. Move on to the next step.

Step 3: Setup custom code for Umbraco 8

Umbraco 8 is different from Umbraco 7 in many ways. This means that in this step, all custom code, controllers, and models need to be reviewed and rewritten for Umbraco 8.

Example of changes that need to be made

One of the changes made, is how published content is rendered through Template files. Due to this, it will be necessary to update all Template files (.cshtml) to reflect these changes.

Read more about these changes in the IPublishedContent section of the Documentation.

• Template files need to inherit from Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoViewPage<ContentModels.HomePage> instead of Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage<ContentModels.HomePage>.
• Template files need to use ContentModels = Umbraco.Web.PublishedModels instead of ContentModels = Umbraco.Web.PublishedContentModels.
• @Model.Value("propertyAlias") replaces @Umbraco.Field("propertyAlias").
• @Model.PropertyAlias replaces @Model.Content.PropertyAlias.
• @Model.Value<IPublishedContent>("propertyAlias") replaces Model.Content.GetPropertyValue<IPublishedContent>("propertyAlias").

Depending on the size of the project and the amount of custom code and implementations, this step is going to require a lot of work.

Continuing after the migration

At this point, the project runs on Umbraco 8 locally. Umbraco 8 is no longer a supported version, and cannot be deployed to Umbraco Cloud yet.

To deploy the project to Umbraco Cloud, follow the upgrade path to a supported version locally.

Related information

• Content Migration for Umbraco CMS - 7 to 8
• Issue tracker for known issues with Content Migration
• Forms on Umbraco Cloud
• Working locally with Umbraco Cloud
• KUDU on Umbraco Cloud