danielchw

Hi,

Just to keep this post updated with proper closure and update.

When I first knew the upgrade of WordPress to version 5.8 failed, email was sent but it is too late, the upgrade had caused the website to unavailable.

The errors stated in the email are:
Error code: copy_failed__copy_dir_retry
Could not copy file.
wp-admin/widgets-form.php

The first step is to recover the website, which I have followed the steps to manually upgrade the WordPress to version 5.8. This has to be done via the console, by replacing all the files in wp-admin and wp-includes folder. This followed by renaming the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and update all the required settings accordingly. Then I cleared the pagespeed cache and restarted the webserver – result OK

The website is now running, but when I logged into the admin dashboard, there is notification message that say the website upgrade has failed and please try again. I searched the forums and website, but all points to the removal of .maintenance file, which unfortunately doesn’t exists on my site.

In order to solve the upgrade failed and to remove the notification, I’ve will first need to restore all the root file and folders to www-data:www-data. This way, it allowed the webserver to access to all the files/folder. Once done, I run the upgrade to version 5.8 again from the update-core.php

This eventually completed successfully, and the notification is gone. I have not turned off the auto-upgrade, set all the files and folders ownership back to original. Will remind myself that a hardened WordPress environment cannot be upgraded automatically, and need to be done when I’ve changed the files/folders permission to allow the webserver access.

This issue is now solved and can be closed.

I did receive email from the site about the failure, both sites are having same error. Below is the snippet of the email on the upgrade error:

Your site was running version 5.7.2. We have some data that describes the error your site encountered. Your hosting company, support forum volunteers, or a friendly developer may be able to use this information to help you:

Error code: copy_failed__copy_dir_retry
Could not copy file.
wp-admin/widgets-form.php