Error message:
The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later. Drupal\Core\Database\DatabaseExceptionWrapper: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table ‘xxxxx_xxxxx.path_alias’ doesn’t exist: SELECT base_table.id AS id, base_table.path AS path, base_table.alias AS alias, base_table.langcode AS langcode FROM {path_alias} base_table WHERE

When attempting to upgrade from Drupal 8.7 to 8.8 *without* Drush/Composer (can’t get Drush to work), I was not able to run the update.php file without getting a path_alias error. This all came down to Drupal 8.8 not adding the tables to the database before attempting to access them. Here’s how I solved this, and ran into some issues with a fresh install of 8.8 that I will document here as well.

Server running PHP 7.2

I installed a fresh directory and database to house a brand-new instance of Drupal 8.8 to attempt to get the tables to empty and move over to my current installation. This was after trying several things, like uninstalling pathauto, and other methods that never worked.

Only thing is, when I attempted to install a fresh 8.8, I was getting stopped at initializing 0%. It appeared to add “some” of the tables needed in the database, but would never finish. And, of course, it didn’t add the tables I needed.

I thought “maybe 8.8 doesn’t work on php 7.2”, so I changed it back to 7.1. This made all the stylizing break on the install, but I started it anyway. This time I chose the demo site. It stopped again after Initializing 0%, so I switched the php back to 7.2, refreshed the page and it finished the install!!!! Minor feat.

I was able to go to the fresh install 8.8 database, truncate the path_alias and path_alias_revision tables, export them into a file by themselves (export – custom), then import them into my 8.7 database. Once I did that, I followed my usual upgrade process and was able to access the update.php page (was logged in before starting all this) and was able to update the db, run cron, clear cache, and fully upgraded.

When everything was done, I had lost all my css/images (paths were off), so I took php back down to 7.1 and then immediately back up to 7.2 and everything worked again.