Can’t Upgrade Plesk – BUSY: Update operation was locked by another update process

Sometimes you’ll find you’re unable to run the Plesk autoinstaller due to a locked process that is preventing the autoinstaller from launching.

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/autoinstaller

The error will be as follows:-

BUSY: Update operation was locked by another update process.

You should try to kill the process first by ID using the following on the command line (SSH):-

ps aux | grep install

It will present something similar to this (which shows the process you’re looking for):-

root 30489 0.0 0.0 7216 824 pts/1 S+ 14:26 0:00 grep installer


You can then kill this process with (replace the ID with the one that your process has):-

kill 30489

Now, the liklihood is, this won’t work properly. Although it won’t return an error, if you ps aux | grep install again, you’ll likely find that the process is back, just under a different ID this time. If not, then you should be able to successfully run the Plesk autoinstaller again otherwise, read on…

If you navigate to the directory /tmp on your server, in here you will find the pesky file that is causing the lock. It should be named psa-installer.lock. You can simply delete this file (ensure there is no active installer running on your server first) and then run the Plesk autoinstaller again from the command line again (this time should work):-

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/autoinstaller

If you run into additional issues or a different issue to the above, you may want to check out this to see if it helps you out.