Legacy LAMP Server Migration: Ubuntu 14.04 to 24.04

Many small businesses still run sites on Ubuntu 14.04 with PHP 5. Hosts are now shutting down vulnerable servers, and an in-place upgrade across five Ubuntu releases and three PHP major versions is slow and hard to undo.

Build a fresh server beside the old one, move the data, prove it matches, then switch DNS. The old server stays untouched until the new one is verified, so rollback is a single DNS change.

Inventory the old server (read-only): PHP modules, vhosts, databases, cron jobs, certificates, ports

Back up each database with exact per-table row counts, plus files, config and SHA-256 checksums

Provision Ubuntu 24.04 with PHP 8, MySQL 8, Certbot, a firewall and automatic security updates

Scan the code for features removed between PHP 5 and 8, then lint every file with PHP 8

Restore, checking every checksum first; old vhosts are staged for review, not enabled blindly

Verify every table's row count against the old server and test real URLs before DNS moves

Cut over DNS, with a documented rollback

Reports each problem with file, line and fix: the mysql_* extension, ereg and split, each(), create_function, mcrypt, magic quotes, curly-brace string offsets, the /e regex modifier and more. It avoids lookalikes such as str_split and mysqli_*, and exits non-zero so it can gate CI.

GitHub Actions runs Bash and ShellCheck on every script, and tests the scanner against a PHP 5 app (must fail, every issue reported) and a PHP 8 app (must pass, no false positives) on PHP 8.3 and 8.4.

This is a personal portfolio project, not client work.