Installing and upgrading help

Hi everyone!

I'm picking this up from Feb since I've finally found how to complete this upgrade (& the time to do it).

So here's how I proceeded - if this may help anyone in the future.

1) Backup the old Moodle 3.0 (see backup & restore moodle documentation)

2) setup a new server (in my case a VM but that's not very relevant here, could juts as well be a physical server, dedicated one...) with the latest version of Ubuntu (I took 18.04 Bionic Beaver, will have to update to 20.04 soon... ) 

3) Restore the backed up moodle on the new server

4) Install PHP: That's where it got a little tricky since php 5.6 wouldn't come out of the box with ubuntu 18.04 so I've followed this link https://askubuntu.com/questions/1048581/install-php5-on-ubuntu-18-04
I've also had to specify php5.6 when installing the php extensions required for Moodle (ex: apt install php5.6-curl)

5) Start the upgrade process.

The upgrade process wasn't super straight forward due to the change in php versions. So I've proceeded in steps, and here's what I ended up doing, which worked well:

1. Upgrade Moodle 3.0 -> 3.2
2. Upgrade php 5.6 -> 7.1
3. Upgrade moodle 3.2 -> 3.8
4. Upgrade php 7.1 -> 7.4

Tada!! Moodle 3.8 running on ubuntu 18.04 with php 7.4 !😁😁😁😁😁

I have to admit I was super pleased by how smoothly moodle upgrade ran, as I didn't have any problems during the process, once I figured out how to tell apache which  version of php to use (see here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42619312/switch-php-versions-on-commandline-ubuntu-16-04)

Great job done by the moodle comunity!

Thanks to all of you for your comments and very helpful pointers!

Aurélie