Drupal Commerce 3.3 Upgrade Trap: Why WSOD Happens and How to De-risk It
Upgrading Drupal Commerce from 3.2 to 3.3 can take a healthy site straight to WSOD, and that is exactly the kind of release risk you need to pre-plan for.
Why I Built It
I dug into this because "minor version" tends to make teams drop their guard, and that is how production outages happen.
If your release process assumes composer update on Commerce minors is low-risk, this issue is a warning sign: dependency and runtime behavior can still shift enough to break every route. I care less about blame and more about operational reality: if a minor can blank the site, your process was under-defended.
The Solution
My takeaway is not "never upgrade." It is "treat Commerce minors like controlled change windows."
What I would enforce before any 3.2 -> 3.3 rollout:
- A reproducible staging clone with production-like config and content shape.
- A lockfile rollback path tested before deployment.
- Automated smoke tests for homepage, checkout, cart, and user account routes.
- A hard stop rule: if any WSOD appears, revert immediately and triage offline.
This pattern works when you already have disciplined CI/CD and lockfile control.
It falls over if your team updates dependencies ad hoc in shared environments.
The Code
No separate repo; this is an upgrade-risk analysis based on a Drupal Commerce issue report, not a new code deliverable.
What I Learned
- "Minor" does not mean "safe" in Commerce-heavy Drupal stacks; treat it as potentially breaking until proven otherwise.
- WSOD-level failures justify rollback-first operations, not live debugging in production.
- Issue queues are not just for maintainers; they are early-warning systems for release managers.
- If your upgrade checklist lacks route-level smoke tests, you are betting availability on luck.