Migration Failed from 1.7.4 → 1.8.1: "Collection not found" error on sites collection

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm trying to upgrade my self-hosted Appwrite from 1.7.4 to 1.8.1 and the migration is consistently failing

Environment:

• Current version: 1.7.4
• Target version: 1.8.1
• Deployment: Self-hosted on Dokploy (modified docker-compose)
• Database: MariaDB 10.11

The Error: Migration fails during document migration phase with:

Failed to migrate project with error: Collection not found
[Error] Type: Utopia\Database\Exception\NotFound
[Error] Message: Collection not found
[Error] File: /usr/src/code/vendor/utopia-php/database/src/Database/Database.php
[Error] Line: 7225

The error occurs in Migration.php(178) → V23.php(63) when trying to process the sites collection.

What I Found:

• ✅ Sites collection exists globally: _8_sites table present in MariaDB
• ✅ Sites metadata is properly defined in _8__metadata
• ✅ The sites table is empty (0 records) - I never used the sites feature
• ✅ All other collections migrated successfully (databases, users, buckets, etc.)
• ❌ Migration script tries to iterate over project-level sites documents that don't exist
• ❌ Error happens in the foreach('sites', ...) call

What Works:

• All my actual data (collections, documents, buckets) migrated successfully
• Rolling back to 1.7.4 works fine with the partially migrated database
• The only failure is on the sites collection (a new 1.8.x feature I never used)

Questions:

1. Has anyone else hit this migrating from 1.7.4 → 1.8.1?
2. Is there a workaround for the sites collection migration issue?
3. Should I upgrade through intermediate versions (1.7.5, 1.8.0) if they exist?
4. Is this a known bug that might be fixed in 1.8.2?

Attempted Solutions:

• Running migrate multiple times (same error every time)
• Manually updating version flag to 1.8.1 (caused additional internalId attribute errors)
• Verified sites collection exists and is properly defined, just the migration logic fails on empty collection

Any help appreciated!