Why is Craft returning a 504 during a system update?

Question

There have been a few updates to the system and some of the plugins I am using. I have installed everything locally and a plugin needed to run new migrations as a result of the update.

Everything works great locally, I went to /admin to "Finish up" the updates.

Now I have moved the files out to my staging server. I always manually update (even though Craft will do this for me). Once all of the files have deployed, I once again visit /admin to run the migrations.

However, the database is quite large (> 100MB) and I am getting a 504 Gateway timeout error.

What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

I've had this issue before.

It's usually to do with one of two things for me - either the PHP script timeout value or the FPM proxy timeout value.

Another method of fixing this is to change the update settings in the general Craft configuration:

'backupDbOnUpdate' => false,

Keep in mind though that you will need to back up the database yourself.

Answer 2

Because your database is a decent size, your server is exceeding the maximum execution time. That is what is resulting in the 504.

Most likely, you will need to disable the auto-update feature and manually make a backup.

Check out this article on how you can trouble shoot this error. (Thanks Brad)

You can also check with your hosting provider to see if they can increase the execution time.