Ghost crashed immediatly after staring

Developer help Self-hosting
1

Ghost version was ~3.11
We decided to upgrade up to version 5.*, of course, first we upgraded to version 3.42.9, raised the site, checked what was working and set it to update to version 5.
After the version 5 was installed, version what ghost used still was 3.42.9. Now the task is just to raise the site, but after ghost start we have next situation:

1. ghost starts successfully
blog@host:/var/www/blog$ ghost start
:heavy_check_mark: Checking system Node.js version - found v14.17.0
:information_source: Ensuring user is not logged in as ghost user [skipped]
:information_source: Checking if logged in user is directory owner [skipped]
:heavy_check_mark: Checking current folder permissions
:heavy_check_mark: Validating config
o✔ Checking memory availability
:heavy_check_mark: Checking binary dependencies
☲ Starting Ghost: <name>
:heavy_check_mark: Starting Ghost: <name>

Your admin interface is located at:

https://<name>/ghost/

2. if try to use ghost status immediatly after it has been started, we recive:
blog@host:/var/www/blog$ ghost status
<name> │ /var/www/blog │ 3.42.9 │ running (production) │ https://<host> │ 2368 │ local

3. if we try next to ghost status, we recive:
<name >│ /var/www/blog │ 3.42.9 │ stopped │ n/a │ n/a │ n/a

Another trys to start/restart also didn’t work

2

You should follow the official documents when upgrading, i.e., upgrade each minor version, before upgrading to the major version. You appear to have skipped V4.

Similarly, you need to ensure Node, MySQL, and ghost-cli are compatible with each version, and upgrade each at the appropriate time.

Hopefully, you took backups at each step, and can rollback.

3

Oh, thank you, after reading the documentation, I missed this moment with the step by step update of each major version.
I guess then in my case, the best solution would be to full reinstall of ghost and “handmade” data rollback from backup. I am quite inexperienced in this matter, maybe there are any tools that will help me in this task?

4

It all depends on your host and backup strategy. If you use services such as Linode or DO, you can take a snapshot before a major change.

Ghost also recommends a backup at each stage using ghost backup.