I have a fairly new GRAV install on a hosted WHM/cPanel VPS. All has been working fine and looking good! Today, I see there is a GRAV update, and about 8 plugins that have updates. Let the fun begin. First, I try updating GRAV. crash and burn, the "SafeUpgrade" pop-up appears and tells me it is "Running". No progress bar movement ever. After about 15 min. I give up on it. And now my system is showing Server Error 500.

(I'm using BRAVE browser with ad blocking disabled for this domain)

GRAV log file is no help. A.I. is no help (after hours of trying all kinds of crap)

After several backup restores and starting over, I have found that I can upgrade all the plugins via the admin if I do them one at a time, until I get to the Admin plugin. Running the update on that or the main GRAV package breaks the site. I've seen this in the past, where after updating GRAV, the update process deleted the main index.php, and I can recover by restoring the index.php from my backup or manually copying it from GitHub. However, that was not the issue this time around.

I'm using PHP 8.2, and with A.I. helping me run down log files, we were never able to find a log entry that explains why my site crashes after updating the Admin plugin.

I even went through the process of opening my site to SSH access and then attempting the update via the GRAV CLI. no difference in outcome.

So, I guess I'll leave the site as is and wait for more patching before trying to update the site again.

I do understand the difficulties around having so many different possible platforms and installation variations, making the process of supporting them all smoothly; however, I also think my setup is a pretty standard type of config used by lots and lots of people, and that makes this kind of critical crash of an update even more annoying to experience.

I can go on. So I figured I'd best see if I can get some help from the GRAV Discord, and even though I have a Discord account that I rarely use, it took me a lot of fiddle farting around to get access to this Discord area. It kept asking me to validate my account, but refused to accept my existing username and password. I ended up having to create a new email address and entering that and a new password in order to get through that process just to post here. It was NOT clear if it was directing me to create a new account because each Discord server needs you to create a new account for it??? OR was it wanting me to simply log in with my existing Discord login credentials? And it's showing my existing account in the lower left of my screen. TOO CONFUSING for those of us who have never or rarely ever used Discord. (and one of the reasons I rarely use Discord in the first place, it has never been an interface that makes sense to my eyeballs.)

Thanks for reading my little rant. Thank you to GRAV DEV team for all their hard work making a great system (when it works). And advance thanks to anyone who can help me solve my "Update Hell". 😉

Hello,

You should state which version of GRAV you're using and which plugin (with version if possible).

GRAV is currently between two major versions 1.7.x and that is not a final public release (release candidate 3).
So the main dev team is currently very busy with this and the server hosting GPM releases is sometimes buggy.

As for 1.7.x version, they updated it to a 1.8 version which became 2.0 because of the huge gap between the 1.x versions and the last ones.
For exemple, the current php mandatory version is 8.3.

I really dislike Discord too, it's a content mess to me.
The key is to only use the search function and filter.

Thanks for the reply and the helpful context about GRAV's current state between versions.

To answer your question about specifics: I am running GRAV v1.7.50.4, and the plugin that breaks the site, I think, is the Admin Panel plugin, v1.10.51. Updating either the Admin plugin or the GRAV Core package results in a Server Error 500.

A few additional details that may help narrow things down:

• I can successfully update all other plugins one at a time through the Admin panel without issue. The failure only occurs when updating the Admin plugin or GRAV Core.

• When I attempted a Safe Upgrade, it got stuck in a loop. The logs showed it was timing out because my PHP configuration only allows 3 seconds for a response, causing the upgrade script to time out, retry, and never advance. (according to A.I., after viewing the grav.log entries)

• I also attempted the upgrade via GRAV CLI over SSH and got the same result.

• I am running PHP 8.2 on a WHM/cPanel VPS. My PHP settings are at hosting-provider defaults --- I have not customized them.

• I had AI assist me in reviewing my PHP info and log files. Nothing jumped out as an obvious cause, but the PHP response timeout during the Safe Upgrade loop seems like it could be a meaningful clue.

At this point, I am leaving the site at its current version and waiting for further releases before trying again --- unless someone here has seen this before and has a direction worth trying.

Any guidance is appreciated. Thank you.

Thanks, with that information I’m pretty sure this is not a PHP version issue.

You may want to check whether you can increase the PHP response timeout, just to be safe. Three seconds is very short. Depending on your host, you may be able to adjust it in the admin panel or in the .htaccess file.

I would also recommend making a full backup first, then trying a manual update via FTP. That avoids timeout issues, and sometimes a previous unfinished update leaves some leftover files behind. I’ve also seen several cases where updates removed index.php.

You should also clear the cache each time, either with bin/grav clear-cache or manually via FTP.

To check all of this quickly, you can run the following commands from your Grav root:

ls -l index.php
grep -n "enabled:" user/config/plugins/admin.yaml
php -v
php -i | grep -E "max_execution_time|max_input_time|memory_limit"
bin/grav clear-cache
bin/grav yamllinter
bin/grav security

This will help verify everything we discussed.

I'm getting ready to dive into this issue and get it resolved today, even if that means a full wipe and reinstall of GRAV and everything else. ugh..

Before I start that I thought I'd SSH in (not done that before) and run the commands @virusX suggested. Here are the results of those commands, and later I will follow up with what I did and if the problem is resolved. ;-)

[vref@us public_html]$ ls -l index.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 vref vref 3415 Oct 31 2025 index.php

[vref@us public_html]$ grep -n "enabled:" user/config/plugins/admin.yaml
1:enabled: true
3:cache_enabled: true
8:twofa_enabled: false
38: enabled: true

[vref@us public_html]$ php -v
PHP 8.2.31 (cli) (built: May 18 2026 17:35:56) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.2.31, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
with the ionCube PHP Loader v13.3.1, Copyright (c) 2002-2024, by ionCube Ltd.

[vref@us public_html]$ php -i | grep -E "max_execution_time|max_input_time|memory_limit"
max_execution_time => 0 => 0
max_input_time => -1 => -1
memory_limit => 128M => 128M

[vref@us public_html]$ bin/grav clear-cache

Command "clear-cache" is not defined.
Do you want to run "clearcache" instead? (yes/no) [no]:

y

Clearing cache

Cleared: /home/vref/public_html/cache/twig/*
Cleared: /home/vref/public_html/cache/doctrine/*
Cleared: /home/vref/public_html/cache/compiled/*
Cleared: /home/vref/public_html/assets/*

Touched: /home/vref/public_html/user/config/system.yaml

[vref@us public_html]$ bin/grav yamllinter

Yaml Linter

User Configuration

[OK] No YAML Linting issues with configuration

Pages Frontmatter

[OK] No YAML Linting issues with pages

Page Blueprints

[OK] No YAML Linting issues with blueprints

[vref@us public_html]$ bin/grav security

Grav Security Check

Scanning 31 pages [=======================================================================================] 100% < 1 sec
[OK] Security Scan complete: No issues found...

More to come. ...

@BZFiend:
GRAV v1.7.50.4

Quick update:

After playing around a bit more, I'm pretty sure the issue is with my version of GRAV (GRAV v1.7.50.4). It refuses to update itself. I updated several other installs that were at v1.7.49.4 with no issues. (I did discover it is better to do plugin updates one at a time. Selecting to update all tends to sometimes have hiccups.) But on this install (1.7.50.4), I was able to update all the plugins through the admin tool successfully, doing them one at a time. But regardless of if I update the plugins first or not, when I attempt the GRAV main system update it fails with the "safe upgrade" pop up claiming it is "Running" which never progresses. Using the CLI, it claims to complete, but does not.

This makes me wonder if this newer version of 1.7 needs that special migration plugin meant for migrating to v2. I remember seeing something about a missing folder named something like /safe_update. I don't remember where I saw it. I think it was after the site went into recovery mode that I had to go get a token from a file to break it out of recovery mode. (I probably should read more documentation to figure this out properly, but hey, I just wanted to upgrade with a click of a button, not educate myself on the under-workings of GRAV.)

So, I'm going to next zip up my user folder and save it. Wipe the public_html folder and install the latest version of GRAV +Admin, and then delete the user folder, restore my zipped up user folder, and see what that does.

I'll update you here after this new attempt.