I’m trying to change Mautic to a composer-based installation so that I can prepare for their upgrade to Mautic 5 and to use their new marketplace feature. The documentation is here: https://docs.mautic.org/en/setup/switch-to-composer, but it looks like it needs to be done via SSH.
Before we make the changes, though, will the cPanel file manager and Softaculous (for installation backups and restores) still work to manage the Mautic installation?
What do these changes do or change from a technical perspective?
Will the paths in the cron jobs need to be updated once these changes are made?
Your software
My Mautic version is: 4.4.2
My PHP version is: 8.0.23
My Database type and version is: 10.2.44-MariaDB-log-cll-lve
I run my Mautic in cPanel and I am using composer version.
It will NOT be a simple task to change it over to composer installed Mautic. You will need to edit a json file specifically for your cPanel.
You should be able to use the same database from Softaculous but I would advise to export the database and create a new database for composer installed Mautic then import it into it.
Yes SSH is require and also composer v2 already installed by your server admin is required as well.
You can use the cPanel built in terminal application if it enabled on your account to determine if composer v2 is installed and part of your cPanel package by typing composer -V
then hit Enter (notice need to be upper case “V”)
I also used the built in terminal to fully install our Mautic.
Do a search on my username on how to grab and edit the composer.json file. I made several post about it in this forum.
I do plan to post a tutorial in this forum but I am waiting for one annoying composer update bug to be fixed before posting.
So it’s not as straight forward as their documentation is sounds like. After the changes you made and the update to the .json file, you’re still able to backup and restore from softaculous?
My first Mautic install was direct from github zipped file unzipped into a webroot folder. I never used the softaculous install but I am aware what softaculous is and how it works on cPanel. I been a cPanel / WHM and Plesk administrator and hosting administrator since 1997.
When they announced that they were switching over to composer install, I did a backup on everything and exported my database then I completely deleted my webroot to start fresh.
At first attempt was not successful because we could not define our webroot path. In later version they release a composer.json that allow our to define the webroot path so I was able to successfully do a new Mautic fresh install then import my database from github zip install into the composer install.
I believe softaculous will be just similar as upgrading from github zip file install. Just backup everything including your /public_html/ folder if you are using cPanel and you will need to grab a composer.json file to edit and set up the path to webroot and other paths.
Search my name, I had a sample composer.json file somewhere posted in this forum I think. If not then I’ll post an another one here.
Thank you so much for your detailed response. The information is very valuable. It looks like Mautic will support security on Mautic 4.x until March 2023 thankfully. (https://www.mautic.org/mautic-releases) I plan on waiting until they release 5 in Sept/Oct 2022 to see if Softaculous offers a way to update the existing install. If not, I will have to find someone that can complete this for me as I am unfamiliar with composer and SSH.