Upgrading to a Drupal minor version

October 25, 2008 by Amr

If you use Drupal like me, then upgrading to the next minor release must be something you do every couple of months. I never asked anybody how they do it. So here I will write how I do it, in the same time I will be actually upgrading my blog to Drupal 6.6. My directory structure:

www/
    `-- amrmostafa.org/

Download and unpack

$: cd www
$: wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.6.tar.gz
$: tar -zxvf drupal-6.6.tar.gz
$: rm *gz

Examine the trees

Instead of moving files from Drupal-6.6 tree, we will move ours there. First step is to find which files we have added to the current drupal:

$: diff <(find amrmostafa.org | cut -d'/' -f2-) <(find drupal-6-6 | cut -d'/' -f2-)

Hail to the GNUs! In my case here is what I found (shortened for weblog use):

< sites/default/settings.php
< sites/default/files
< sites/default/files/.htaccess
< sites/default/files/color
< sites/default/files/color/minnelli-d374532c
< sites/default/files/color/minnelli-d374532c/....
< sites/default/files/color/minnelli-d374532c/...

So it's pretty clear to me now. The changes are settings.php of course, files directory and color module cache for minnelli theme which I use. Also. a usual difference is usually the contrib modules you have added. Alternatively, if you are using a revision control system like me (I use git), you could get away with this:

$: git status

Which produces:

# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       sites/default/files/
#       sites/default/settings.php

That gives you the untracked files, which are probably cache, settings and that sort of stuff. What else would be there? The contrib modules/themes.

Merge the trees

Of course, we could have scripted the merge, but I never do this. Why? Because settings.php and others like .htaccess could have been changed between releases so I want to capture my personal customizations as well as any newly added bits in the 6.6 release. This is not easy. What I usually do is diff settings.php and .htaccess (if it had any changes) and move my customizations manually to the 6.6's one. The rest (files/, contrib modules ..etc) are probably safe to move right away.

$: diff -Nur amrmostafa.org/sites/default/settings.php drupal-6.6/sites/default/default.settings.php

In my case, there were no changes in the root's .htaccess file, so no need to diff. And for settings.php the only change were the database line. So it's safe to overwrite.

$: cp amrmostafa/sites/default/settings.php drupal-6.6/sites/default/settings.php
$: cp -rp amrmostafa/sites/default/files drupal-6.6/sites/default/

I've nothing else to move, but if you do have things like contrib modules, just move them over to the drupal-6.6.

Backup and conclusion

$: cp -r amrmostafa.org /path/to/backup/amrmostafa.org.$(date +%s)
$: cp -rp amrmostafa.org/.git drupal-6.6/
$: rm -rf amrmostafa.org/
$: mv drupal-6.6 amrmostafa.org/

Now just execute: http://example.com/update.php to get any possible new db updates. You are done! I know that's is ain't short as it ought to be. That's why I'm going to think about my approach a bit. I'm sure at least git would have helped me do it in few seconds. Suggestions? Please!

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