Migrate to Grav 2.0

Stages a fresh Grav 2.0 install alongside your existing Grav 1.7 or 1.8 site and hands off to a standalone migration wizard. The plugin itself does not perform the migration — it exists solely to download Grav 2.0, drop a self-contained migrate.php at your webroot, and get out of the way so the wizard can run in a fresh PHP process with no 1.x code loaded.

Why a standalone handoff?

In-place upgrades from 1.x → 2.0 are not safe: the vendor stacks differ, file locks and opcache pinning can corrupt mid-upgrade state, and any failure leaves an unbootable site. This plugin's job is to make the handoff boring: download, drop, redirect. Everything risky happens later, in a process that has no relationship to your running 1.x install.

Requirements

• Grav 1.7.50+ or 1.8.x
• Write access to your webroot and tmp/ directory
• PHP 7.3.6+ (for the kickoff itself; the 2.0 wizard requires PHP 8.3+)

Installation

bin/gpm install migrate-grav

Usage

From the admin

Click Migrate to Grav 2.0 in the sidebar. Press the staging button. Your browser will be redirected to /migrate.php and you'll be running the wizard outside of Grav 1.x.

From the CLI

bin/plugin migrate-grav init

Then follow the printed instructions to start the wizard in a fresh PHP process (either php migrate.php or by visiting the URL).

Status

bin/plugin migrate-grav status

Configuration

user/config/plugins/migrate-grav.yaml:

enabled: true
source_url: 'https://getgrav.org/download/core/grav-update/2.0.0-beta.1?testing'
source_local_zip: ''        # absolute path to a local 2.0 zip (dev only)
stage_dir: 'grav-2'
require_super_admin: true

Twig in content

Grav 2.0 changed how editor-authored Twig (Twig inside page content) is secured: the security.twig_content gate is off by default, a sandbox restricts what content Twig can do, and the blanket undefined_functions escape hatch was removed — an unlisted Twig function or filter is now a hard error. The safe_functions / safe_filters allow-lists are retained (and hardened: command/code-execution functions can never be enabled). The migration tries to preserve your 1.x behavior:

• It turns the security.twig_content gate back on when your source site used Twig in content (per-page process: twig: true or the site-wide system.yaml opt-ins).
• It scans your Twig-enabled page content for the functions/filters it calls. Raw PHP functions (e.g. strtoupper) are added to system.twig.safe_functions / safe_filters (so they're callable at all) and to the security.twig_sandbox.allowed_functions / allowed_filters lists (so sandboxed content may call them). Your existing safe_functions entries are preserved and merged in.
• Plugin-provided Twig functions (e.g. unite_gallery) are added to the sandbox allow-list, but the providing plugin must still register them — ideally via the onBuildTwigSandboxPolicy event. These are listed in the migration report.
• Functions Grav 2.0 refuses — Utils::isDangerousFunction() (system, exec, preg_replace, …) and the sandbox's by-design exclusions (constant, read_file, evaluate, …) — are never added; the report lists them so you know those usages need reworking.

What it can't detect automatically: custom object methods and properties used in content Twig (for example a plugin object's {{ thing.render() }}) can't be found by a static scan, because the object's class isn't known until runtime. Grav 2.0 already allowlists the common page, media, config, and user classes, so most content keeps working. If something still renders as raw Twig (or shows a sandbox placeholder) after migration, check logs/security.log, then either add the class/method to security.twig_sandbox.allowed_methods by hand or — better — update the providing plugin to a 2.0 version that registers its safe Twig members via the onBuildTwigSandboxPolicy event.

The allowlists written to user/config/security.yaml are the full lists (core defaults plus your additions) on purpose: Grav merges these lists by index, so a partial override would corrupt the core defaults. If you prune an entry, leave the rest intact.

Aborting

If you want to start over before launching the wizard, remove:

• .migrating at your webroot
• The staged subdirectory (default: grav-2/)
• tmp/grav-2.0-staged.zip

Your existing Grav 1.x site is untouched.

Recovering from a failed promote

The promote step is the only point where the wizard touches your live webroot. It runs in three phases:

1. Phase 1 — backup zip. Every file in your live 1.x install (except the staged grav-2/) is zipped to grav-2/backup/migration-backup-<version>--<timestamp>.zip. After promote this lands at backup/<…>.zip next to Grav's other backups.
2. Phase 2 — delete. Top-level entries at the webroot are removed.
3. Phase 3 — promote. Contents of grav-2/ are renamed up to the webroot.

If Phase 2 or Phase 3 fails partway through, your live webroot may be partially destroyed. The backup zip from Phase 1 is your recovery artifact.

Before you retry, identify and free the lock. The most common failure (especially on Windows, where open files can't be deleted) is a code editor, git GUI, or terminal holding a file handle on something inside your webroot — .git/index, .git/objects/pack/*.idx, a .log being tailed. The wizard will now report the specific path that failed; close whatever has it open.

To restore from the backup zip:

• Windows: in File Explorer, right-click the zip → Extract All… and pick your webroot. The Extract All wizard reconstructs the directory tree correctly. 7-Zip and WinRAR also work fine.
• macOS: double-click in Finder (Archive Utility extracts a proper tree), or unzip migration-backup-*.zip -d /path/to/webroot from Terminal.
• Linux: unzip migration-backup-*.zip -d /path/to/webroot.

Once the webroot is restored, follow the Aborting steps above to clear the wizard state, then re-run the wizard from the admin.

"The zip extracts as flat files with · or \ in their names"

If you ran the wizard on Windows with a version prior to 1.0.0-rc.3, the backup zip it created has a separator bug — entry names use \ (Windows path separator) instead of / (zip spec). Every standards-tolerant extractor (7-Zip, Archive Utility, Windows Explorer's in-place viewer) treats the backslashes as literal filename characters and dumps every file in the zip's root with names like user\plugins\admin\file.php (or, in some viewers, user·plugins·admin·file.php).

To repair such a zip, copy user/plugins/migrate-grav/wizard/mg-repair-backup.php from this plugin to any directory and run:

php mg-repair-backup.php migration-backup-1.7.x--20260507111032.zip

It writes migration-backup-1.7.x--20260507111032.fixed.zip next to the original with all entry names normalized to forward slashes. Extract the fixed zip with any tool and the directory tree will be correct.

The script is self-contained — no Grav, no Composer, no plugin context. It just needs PHP 8.1+ with the zip extension. Backup-zip writes from 1.0.0-rc.3 onward no longer have this bug regardless of OS.

License

MIT