Upgrading complex Magento 2 projects can be time-consuming, especially when you have many customisations and complexities that need taking into account.

Internally at Ampersand, we have been working on a tool to help us identify common overrides or preferences which are affected by upgrades. This improves the speed and quality with which upgrades are delivered to our clients.

This tool looks for files which have been modified as part of the upgrade and attempts to see if you have any overrides in your site. This allows you to focus on the things that have changed and are specific to your site.
The tool specifically checks for:

• Preferences (in global/frontend/adminhtml di.xml)
• Overrides
  • phtml / js
  • layout xml
  • html (knockout templates)

As with Magento, the tool has been open sourced so that other developers can report bugs or contribute features.

You can take a look and download the Magento 2 Upgrade Patch Helper.

We’ve been using this tool for a few years now and we hope that others will continue to benefit from it too!