Updating Drupal Core

We've been recommending that you use Subversion to manage your Drupal site, so these instructions are geared towards using it to upgrade.

The instructions also presume that your site can be taken offline during the upgrading process. If you've have a site that you can't take offline while the process is completed, you've got a whole other set of complicated issues to deal with!

These instructions were written based on upgrading Drupal 6.14 to Drupal 6.15.

Prepare the current site
Before you proceed with upgrading the site, there's a few recommended steps to take to ready the live site for updating:

1. Backup your existing site and database
   Using the Backup and Migrate module, make a backup of your database (/admin/content/backup_migrate).
   IMPORTANT! Multi-site installs using a single Drupal core need to backup each site's database!

2. Commit the live site to the Subversion repository.
   svn commit -m "Site prepped for Drupal core update."

3. Optionally, at this point you can create a tag of the site in your svn repo. Change the release number as necessary for your particular site.
   
   svn copy http://svn.example.com/svn/projectname/trunk \
http://svn.example.com/svn/projectname/tags/release-1.0 \
-m "<projectname> prior to Drupal core 6.15 upgrade"
4. Log into your site as USER 1 (the root user, created during initial install), and place the site in Offline mode (/admin/settings/site-maintenance).
5. Switch your theme back to the default theme (''Garland' in 6.x) (/admin/build/themes).
   IMPORTANT! Multi-site installs need to do this for every site using the codebase!

6. Turn off all modules that are not Core Modules (/admin/build/modules).
   IMPORTANT! Multi-site installs need to do this for every site using the codebase!

Create the updated site copy

1. Download the new Drupal core:
   
   cd /var/websites/projectname/htdocs
svn export http://<your_svn_server>/svn/drupal/6.x/core/current drupal-6.15
svn commit -m "Drupal-6.15 core added."
2. Copy the following files from the old site into the new Drupal directory:
   • .htaccess
     
     cp -p drupal-6.14/.htaccess drupal-6.15/
   • Symbolic link the the sites directory into the new Drupal core:
     
     cd drupal-6.15
rm -rf sites
ln -s ../sites sites

Activate the new Drupal core and upgrade your modules

1. Adjust your Apache configuration to serve the new copy of the site. This likely means editing /usr/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and changing the DocumentRoot and <Directory> directives to the new Drupal 6.15 folder. Remember to restart Apache after you make the changes.
2. Run update.php by going to http://www.example.com/update.php with your web browser.
3. Check the site status page (/admin/logs/status) and confirm that things are working ok.
4. Delete any of your outdated modules and download the new versions for your Drupal core. Ex:
5. Activate the non-core modules that your site was using prior to the upgrade (/admin/build/modules).
6. Download new versions of any custom themes that need upgrading.
7. Run update.php by going to http://www.example.com/update.php with your web browser.
8. Check the site status page (/admin/logs/status) and confirm that things are working ok.
9. Change your theme back if you weren't using Drupal's default theme.
10. Put your site back online (/admin/settings/site-maintenance).