Quick Guide on Manually Updating a Drupal 7 Website

There, now Drupal Mill is updated from Drupal 7.4 to 7.10 and all contribs likewise. Finally I can begin the real work on making the changes to the existing features as well as start adding the new ones.

The updating went very smooth, not one single hiccup, this is how I did it:

Create the Local Mirror Site

1. Copied the whole sites folder to a local mirror installation.
2. Used the Backup and Migrate module to take a snapshot of the database.
3. Installed Drupal 7.4 on my local dev server
4. Added

   $conf['file_temporary_path'] = '/tmp';

   to settings.php. This is important if the path on the live site is different, then there is a big risk the local test site wont work at all. See Configuration / Media / File system for the Temporary path value to use. In my case it was '/tmp'.
5. Enabled the Backup and Migrate module.
6. Restored the database.
7. Cleaned the cache.

Now I had an as exact copy of the live site as possible that I could test the updating process to make sure nothing would go wrong.

I wanted to use drush to perform the updating, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have an option that let you select which version to update to. It is update to what it recommends or do it manually. Reason I wanted to be able to select is that the site had quite a few dev versions of contribs and I wanted to update to stable releases. But if there is a dev version that is newer, then drush would recommend that and not the stable. So I had to do it the manual way instead. Maybe good I can't use drush on my hosting account..

Perform a Local Update

When I update Drupal sites, I always update the contribs first, so the test process went like this:

1. Open the Available Updates page and download the versions to update to.
2. Delete all module folders that will be updated.
3. Unpack the new versions.
4. Run update.php
5. Double check the log to see if there are any errors.

Note: Make sure you check all new versions of the modules so they don't have any new special requirements. It is possible they for example have added a requirement for a certain version of Drupal, or other contrib module. If it does, you need to adjust your update strategy accordingly.

If everything goes well, then its Drupals turn:

6. Delete all folders except sites and all root files except .htaccess
7. Copy in the new version, except the above, install.php and all *.txt (except robots.txt of course)
8. Run update.php

If you have made changes to robots.txt, then you might leave the old version intact as well.

Then again look in the log, check around the site to make sure everything seems to work. If so then:

Update the Live Site:

The procedure here is almost the same as when I do the test update, just a few extra steps to make sure I don't risk losing any content etc that has been added since I took the database dump. The process is like this:

1. Put the site in maintenance mode.
2. Make a new database backup.
3. Perform step 2 - 8 above.

That's it. The site is now updated and working with the latest version of Drupal and all the contribs. If everything works, the only thing left to to is to take the site out of Maintenance mode so your visitors can enjoy it once again.

I have used the above updating procedure for a long time now, and it has worked very well for me.

Let the Fun Begin

Now when Drupal Mill is updated I can begin the work on adding all the new exiting features I plan for it. First though I need to get rid of some old stuff that hangs around, including the blog module.

First though, I am going to treat myself to watching a movie after the successful updating.