Introduction

Magento is one of the most complete e-commerce platforms on the open source market. With a default Magento installation, all the common e-commerce features, such as catalog navigation, promotion rules, tax settings, online payments, and so on are available.

The first version of Magento was released in 2008 after one year of development. Magento was initially designed as an e-commerce system that could be used for a wide range of uses. In later years, Magento became very popular as an out-of-the-box e-commerce system and a lot of minor versions of the 1.x series have been released in the last few years.

To be future proof, Magento started the development of a major upgrade of the system, also known as Magento 2. Magento 2 is a big improvement on every part of Magento. Every aspect is analyzed and rewritten with up-to-date technologies to be ready for the future. Everything, including the developer experience, maintainability, performance, and technologies will be improved.

In this chapter, we will upgrade the data of a Magento 1 installation to a Magento 2 installation. We will also prepare some tools that we can use in the following chapters of this book.