Update Typo3 9.5 with Composer - composer-php

Question

i'm supposed to update a typo3 v9.5 site from a customer of mine. before im going to touch the live system i wanted to make a dry run with demo sites, so i spun up a clean 9.5 site running
composer create-project typo3/cms-base-distribution:^9.5 .
after that i did the typo3 web install stuff and got the site working. What i want to achieve now is to update the site to atleast 10.4. i ran the database analyzer at first and it told me that everything is fine as you can see here.
after that i ran the upgrade wizard. it told me that it had to change the database collation due to it being utf_8_general_ci. but nothing else had to be done.
after that i went to make a composer update --with-dependencies and this told me that there is nothing to install, update or to remove. im kinda confused at this point because there are no points where the system showed the opportunity for a major update. after trying a few things i went to update the composer.json itself and replaced it with a composer.json from a clean 10.4 version looking like that:
{
"repositories": [
{ "type": "composer", "url": "https://composer.typo3.org/" }
],
"name": "typo3/cms-base-distribution",
"description" : "TYPO3 CMS Base Distribution",
"license": "GPL-2.0-or-later",
"config": {
"platform": {
"php": "7.2"
}
},
"require": {
"helhum/typo3-console": "^6.0.0#beta",
"typo3/cms-about": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-backend": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-belog": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-beuser": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-core": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-dashboard": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-extbase": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-extensionmanager": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-felogin": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-filelist": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-fluid": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-fluid-styled-content": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-form": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-frontend": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-impexp": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-info": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-install": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-recordlist": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-rte-ckeditor": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-seo": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-setup": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-sys-note": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-t3editor": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-tstemplate": "^10.4",
"typo3/cms-viewpage": "^10.4"
},
"scripts":{
"typo3-cms-scripts": [
"typo3cms install:fixfolderstructure",
"typo3cms install:generatepackagestates"
],
"post-autoload-dump": [
"#typo3-cms-scripts"
]
}
}
after running another composer update the update itself gets made, however the database doesnt get updated leading to me not being able to loging because of missing tables. i obviously didnt update the site right, now what did i do wrong? i tried following the official typo3 documentation.
Oops, an error occurred! An exception occurred while executing 'SELECT content FROM cache_hash WHERE (identifier = ?) AND (expires >= ?)' with params ["d07b003d9fce07cd551ada22027bf881", 1626341203]: Table 'complan4.cache_hash' doesn't exist
the composer.json looked like that before:
{
"repositories": [
{ "type": "composer", "url": "https://composer.typo3.org/" }
],
"name": "typo3/cms-base-distribution",
"description" : "TYPO3 CMS Base Distribution",
"license": "GPL-2.0-or-later",
"config": {
"platform": {
"php": "7.2"
}
},
"require": {
"helhum/typo3-console": "^5.5.5",
"typo3/minimal": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-about": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-adminpanel": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-belog": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-beuser": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-felogin": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-fluid-styled-content": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-form": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-impexp": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-info": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-redirects": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-reports": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-rte-ckeditor": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-setup": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-seo": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-sys-note": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-t3editor": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-tstemplate": "^9.5",
"typo3/cms-viewpage": "^9.5"
},
"scripts":{
"typo3-cms-scripts": [
"typo3cms install:fixfolderstructure",
"typo3cms install:generatepackagestates"
],
"post-autoload-dump": [
"#typo3-cms-scripts"
]
}
}

Answer 1

After running the composer update you can't login to the full backend anymore, but you still can login to the install tool containing the necessary upgrade and maintenance modules.
Just use https://your.domain.tld/typo3/install.php
and login with the given install tool password, which should be the same as the admin password if you just did a quick and dirty default install.
Then you can run all the necessary DB updates and upgrade wizards.
If you still run into problems you might want to consider booking a professional upgrade service.