Support

 Trying to upgrade Admin Tools from 2.6.0 to 2.6.2 (as the updater has asked me to).

The failure warning is:
Unable to read archive (zip)
Extracting the update package failed. Please try updating the extension manually.

I've upgraded Admin Tools dozens of times in this same manner with no issues. I saw a post about turning on the FTP layer of Joomla, but we keep this off for security reasons and have never needed it to update Akeeba in the past.

Thanks for taking a look...

Enabling the FTP layer was the response for an unwritable tmp folder. In your case there was a problem extracting the zip file containing the update. Please download the component and install it through Extension Manager. That will avoid another error message that you haven't gotten yet from Live Update. Admin Tools 2.6.0 is the last version with Live Update in it, all future updates will be done through Joomla!'s extension updater.

This worked for Admin Tools, thanks!

Followup question: I went to upgrade Akeeba Backup from 3.10.1 to 3.10.2, got the same error, downloaded 3.10.2 and tried to upgrade it manually and I get an error that the upload failed. Trying to the Akeeba built-in updater, I get the same:
Unable to read archive (zip)
Extracting the update package failed. Please try updating the extension manually.

Any ideas for Akeeba Backup?

We've run into quite a few problems with the archive being too large. You may need to incease your maximum upload size.

The packages of our latest versions of our components are rather big. Since the default maximum upload size on most servers is just 2Mb this may cause an upload error. The best solution is to ask your host to set the following in the server's php.ini:

upload_max_filesize = 10M
post_max_size = 10M

If this is not possible, there's a good chance that the following lines in your .htaccess file may work on most servers:

php_value upload_max_filesize 10M
php_value post_max_size 10M

There is also another alternative, but it won't work on all hosts: installation by URL. Please go to the Download section of our site and select the software and version you want to download. Next to the "Download now" button you will see a link called "DirectLink". Right click on it and select "Copy link address" (the exact phrase depends on the browser, but it should have to do about copying the link or its address / URL / location).

Now go to your site's back-end, Extensions, Extensions Manager and find the Install from URL field. Note: on Joomla! 3.x you have to click on the "Install from URL" tab to see that field. Replace the contents of the "Install URL" field with the contents of your clipboard (the DirectLink URL you copied above) and click on the "Install" button next to this textbox. As long as your server supports installing extensions from URL the installation should go through.

If this still doesn't help you can always follow the manual installation instructions in our troubleshooting documentation.

That did it, thanks! I logged in to WHM, edited PHP settings upload_max_filesize from 2M to 4M, restarted Apache and MySQL (mostly unnecessary, but why not) and tried the install again - it went just fine.

Thanks a million for all the help...

You're welcome!