Upgrading from previous versions

Last updated February 14, 2012. Created by jojo21 on August 25, 2002.
Edited by shrikantsatarkar, nedjo, Christopher Jam..., doublejosh. Log in to edit this page.

Keeping your Drupal site up to date

From time to time, there will be minor updates to Drupal core. If the release is designated as a security update, you should apply the update as soon as you can. Otherwise, you may choose to apply the update at any time to receive the bug fixes it contains. There are also major release upgrades; these you may want to apply so you have all the new and powerful features.

Whether or not you apply a major release upgrade is highly individual to the person responsible for that decision. Upgrading to a new major version usually requires a significant investment of time and work, as a lot may have changed between versions. If everything is working great for you, and you don't want to add any of the new features, you may decide to stick with your current major release of Drupal.

About Drupal versions

What's the difference? Major versions (upgrade) versus Minor versions (update)

Before you start updating or upgrading your Drupal installation it is important that you know the difference between a major and a minor version release.

A major version of Drupal core is represented by the number before the first decimal. For example Drupal 5.1, Drupal 6.1, and Drupal 7.1 are all different major releases. This is considered an upgrade. A minor version of Drupal core is represented by the decimal. For example, Drupal 6.1, 6.13, and 6.23 are all different minor releases of Drupal 6. This is considered an update.

You can read more about Drupal's version numbering in our Documentation.

Major releases include changes to core and how Drupal functions. New tools, structure changes, how everything works and looks, can be changed in a major version update.

Minor releases fix security issues and newly discovered bugs but include no new features. This is an example of a minor release announcement.

Minor update procedure

With a minor release update; such as from Drupal 6.1 to the latest Drupal 6.x version, you do not have to apply all the updates that have been released between the versions. You can jump directly from 6.1 to that version.

Major upgrade procedure

A major release upgrade requires you to first update to the current minor release prior to applying the major release update. If 6.19 is the current version of Drupal 6, and your site is running 6.13, you would first need to update to 6.19 and then apply the update to the current major version 7.

You cannot skip major releases when upgrading your site. This means that if you want to upgrade a Drupal 5 installation to Drupal 7, you must first upgrade from Drupal 5 to 6, and then up to Drupal 7.

However, if you have a complex Drupal 5 site that you would like to upgrade to Drupal 7, you may want to consider starting the code and configuration fresh in a new Drupal 7 installation, then importing content and users from Drupal 5 using Migrate or similar modules.

Keep up to date on security announcements

It is strongly recommended that you always keep your Drupal site up to date with the very latest minor release available, to remove known security vulnerabilities and existing bugs.

Following are some of the most common ways to stay informed:

Your website: Via the Update manager (Drupal 7) and Update status (Drupal 6). Drupal can check for the latest release of core and any installed modules and themes. For more details visit the Update manager (and Update status) page. Security Announcements:

Security advisories page: All security announcements are published to this page Security newsletter. Log in, go to your user profile page and subscribe to the security newsletter on the Edit > My newsletters tab. Security advisories feed: You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the Security advisories page.

More information about upgrades

Read UPGRADE.txt located in Drupal's root directory. Read the release announcements for the version to which you're upgrading. Upgrading to the most recent version of a contributed module, see How to update a module. Find your contributed module Upgrade Status via this module! If you are the maintainer of contributed or custom:

module(s), see Updating your modules page. theme(s), see Updating a theme to a new version page.

Troubleshooting

If you experience problems during your site upgrade, see the Troubleshooting FAQ. Instead of commenting here, please read the module project page and, if necessary, post an issue or post a message in the forums.

Attachment Size

drupal-7.11.tar_.gz 2.66 MB

Comments

Upgrading Drupal using a Patch File

Posted by QuangVan on May 2, 2009 at 6:15pm

Just wanted to note that you could upgrade Drupal using a Patch File.

Full Details Here: Upgrading Drupal with Patch File

You can also download the patch Files here:

Upgrade Drupal Easier

Haven't tried it myself, but having upgraded Drupal the traditional way, the Patch method seems easier.

Regards,
Quang

Wealth Programming

Thanks for upgrading Drupal

Posted by notouch002 on August 22, 2010 at 9:16am

Thank you for share. This information is useful for me. In the future I will used Drupal for my website.

Yes same here.. Thanks a lot

Posted by steevejason on December 5, 2011 at 10:28am

Yes same here.. Thanks a lot

Upgrade Drupal easily with Drush

Posted by greg.1.anderson on May 15, 2009 at 5:06pm

Update, 15 April 2010: Drush, the Drupal shell now supports updates of Drupal core via the drush update command for minor updates, and drush site-upgrade for major version upgrades.

drush update will do a minor update in-place on your site. Be sure to always work on a development copy, not your live site! Be aware that drush will replace all of your core and module files with clean copies of the latest release, so you should be sure to save any modifications you may have made to .htaccess and robots.txt files, or other customizations.

drush site-upgrade will copy your Drupal 6.x site to a new document root, upgrading it to the next major version in the process. This process might not work perfectly, but if it does fail for some reason, you can always put off your upgrade and try again when a new version is available.

Try it out; it's fast and easy!

Drush Drupal core update questions

Posted by jfro on December 22, 2009 at 4:56pm

Thanks for the Drush update directions. It went well, but I have a couple followup comments:

1. drush dl download the new Drupal version to the root of my existing Drupal root directory, not the "modules" directory as you indicated.

2. I was nervous about overwriting the "sites" and ".htaccess" files so I removed them from the new Drupal core before running the rsync command.

Do I need to delete them, or does your rsync command keep my original "sites" and ".htaccess" files safe automatically?

Thanks!

Fantastic Greg, this is

Posted by ywarnier on December 6, 2011 at 9:39pm

Fantastic Greg, this is really cutting down on time taken by upgrades. I launched it once and the Google Analytics module reported an error (cannot redeclare...), but then I launched it another time and it just went well.
The themes were somewhat broken, so I recovered them from the backup directory. This worked for an upgrade from D6.16 to D6.20 and a series of 15 modules.

update v upgrade.

Posted by jpmizell on January 6, 2012 at 11:20pm

This comment concerns me. Is the Drush upgrade command really and update command?

-ShuaiBaJ @ developing new content

Watch your robots.txt and .htaccess files!!

Posted by Berto on November 2, 2009 at 5:05pm

I need to add one important comment. If you copy a new version onto an old version, make sure that you do NOT overwrite your robots.txt and .htaccess files if you have custom ones.

This happened on one of my recent upgrades in Drupal 5.x and I bombed out both files, and my 301 redirects in .htaccess and disallow tags in robots.txt got lost for a month. Was definitely bad for business, so learn from my mistakes :)

- Berto
-- Founder, http://www.PricePlow.com - Beta Alanine & Scivation Xtend

Thanks for the tip. I renamed

Posted by mot on June 18, 2010 at 4:31pm

Thanks for the tip. I renamed them to .rel, copied over my .htaccess and robots.txt from remote and used WinMerge to compare new and old versions with ease so I could even update those.

Love this tip...

Posted by tomcatuk on August 13, 2010 at 8:23am

....I fell for this myself to my cost - twice. Never again.

it's easy to do

Posted by activebodi on August 15, 2010 at 9:52am

Its easy to do, I get ahead of myself and often make similar mistakes

Wade Mc

ActiveBodi
www.activebodi.com

Drop cache_block table if you use the Block Cache module

Posted by Greg Go on July 26, 2009 at 4:58am

Block Cache's functionality is part of Drupal 6 core, so you don't need the module anymore. But they use the same table name.

update.php will fail to create the cache_block table if it already exists. (see http://drupal.org/node/200221)

Unfortunately, there's no uninstall option for the Block Cache module, so you will need to manually drop the cache_block table.

Suggested fix if you've already upgraded before dropping the cache_block table is to use Devel module to manually run the create table query.

(This is for upgrading from Drupal 5.x to 6.x. Oops, I should have put it on 6.x tutorial page instead. If a kind admin would move it... thanks!)

Upgrading from a minor release to another

Posted by suffering drupal on November 26, 2009 at 11:43am

"If upgrading from one minor release to another, such as 6.3 to 6.14, jump straight to the latest release within that major version."
What does "jump straight to the latest release" mean? Just delete and substitute all the core modules and do an upgrade, or are there more essential steps to make?

I started with Drupal in 2007 and then my life got stuck...

Re: Upgrading from a minor release to another

Posted by juan_g on November 26, 2009 at 1:27pm

I think the meaning here is to upgrade in one step between minor releases 6.3 -> 6.14, with no need for 6.3 -> 6.4 -> 6.5 -> etc. On the other hand, for distant major releases, intermediate steps are necessary: 4.x -> 5.x -> 6.x.

The other point related to what you say is the not well documented difference between major upgrades and minor updates, which in fact are much quicker and easier. See for example The current UPGRADE.txt lacks instructions for minor updates (6.x -> 6.y).

Only the directories?

Posted by suffering drupal on August 15, 2011 at 3:04pm

Hi thanks Juan_g. What I meant is when upgrading from 6.x to 6.y is it enough to ONLY substitute the directories (cgi-bin, includes, misc. modules, etc...), or do we also have to substitute the (some?) FILES in the root (changelog.txt, upgrade.txt, etc...)???

And while I apreciate that you answer indicating what you THINK is needed, I would for once like to see answers from someone who really KNOWS what is the correct thing to do. Too frequently here at Drupal we newbies have to try to solve problems amongst us based on what we think (deduct) might be a solution and too little I see real solutions from the ones that actually know, make or control.

I started with Drupal in 2007 and then my life got stuck...

http://drupal.org/node/340073

Posted by dashaver on November 30, 2009 at 3:39am

This is also a very good page on the upgrade from v5 to v6
http://drupal.org/node/340073

dashaver
www.dashaver.com

Hello, I'm working on a local

Posted by 56rosa on August 18, 2010 at 8:21pm

Hello,

I'm working on a local host. So, do I need to upgrade as well to 6.19? I have 6.17 at the moment.
All the steps that I have read seem to be dealing with sites that are already live.

Yes, you should upgrade to

Posted by greg.1.anderson on August 23, 2010 at 2:09pm

Yes, you should upgrade to 6.19, and you should first upgrade a copy of your site, not the site itself, even if it is not yet live. This will make it easier to roll back if something goes wrong in the upgrade.

Take a look at drush; it makes it easy to copy and upgrade sites with the sql-sync and pm-update commands.

Determine your contrib module upgrade-ability

Posted by doublejosh on July 13, 2011 at 7:18pm

You can use this module to determine your contrib module upgrade-ability!
http://drupal.org/project/upgrade_status

Thanks

Posted by ptrain on August 15, 2011 at 11:06am

This is an easy way to work out if you can upgrade, been wanting to update drupal for a while... Thanks for the link...

Caleb trains robots!

Hi

Posted by nehaj07 on September 21, 2011 at 11:50am

I am stuck in drupal upgrade.
I have site in drupal 6.19 and i want to upgrade it into drupal 7 .
there are some modules in my site which are not found in 7 .
Can any one help me to upgrade drupal 6 to 7.
A step by step guide...

Thanx in advance

Need steps to upgrade major version

Posted by nehaj07 on September 21, 2011 at 11:52am

Is there any step by step tutorial or video tutorial to upgrade drupal 6 to 7.
Please help....

The Minor update procedure

Posted by captnbli on October 11, 2011 at 1:19pm

The Minor update procedure section does not tell me anything useful for an update from 7.7 to 7.8. And there are no links to anywhere else that might tell me something useful. Exactly how do you perform a minor update? What steps are involved? I'm sure there are endless forum posts on this topic. And now I am going to look them up. But I an many others would not have to if this page told us what we needed to know.

Thanks for making Drupal better than it was.

Regards,
Pete Miller (The Captn)

Upgrading from 7.4 to 7.10

Posted by rtdunn on December 17, 2011 at 5:20pm

Hi,

I don't really think I'm that thick! I'm trying to develop a website using Drupal 7 on my Linux server via my Windows XP PC and have come unstuck.

I've uploaded 7.10 and extracted the files. I've run update.php, and getting an error message from a page called 'Drupal database update' with a progress list saying Verify requirements(done), Overview(done)l Review updates(active), Run updates,
Review log, and in the middle 'No pending updates'
â€¢Front page
â€¢Administration pages
That's where everything stops.

The site status page says that 7.10 has not installed. Reading further, I'm told that I need to remove Drupal core files. There are a large number of these, and I suspect that if I move all these folders and files into another folder on my server, a rerun of update.php will miss all the configuration work I did on v7.4.

The overheads in getting to this point in designing a website, that in principle Drupal seems to be appropriate for, do not seem to be worth the time and effort. I have created pages, users, etc, but new theme modules that I loaded don't work either. I don't really want to use somoeone else's look and feel as I have my own header graphic.

Unless there is anyone out there who can help, or convince me otherwise, I would advise anyone starting out with Drupal, to just use Dreamweaver and load forum software or any other type of software. It would be so much quicker!!!

Tim

Minor Update and Database Changes

Posted by gcbound on February 3, 2012 at 5:15pm

I don't have oodles of experience with minor updates, so this is probably a naive question. I've always backed up the database as part of that process and I realize it's still part of the recommended procedure. But...in practice, do minor updates usually make changes to the database? Do they make schema changes, value changes, both?

The temptation is to only swap out the relevant files in the directory tree and fire the site back up :) (Having an up-to-date database backup of course) Actually the closer I am to a "throw away" site (for testing interaction of modules, my learning, etc.), the more that backup seems dispensable too.

Any thoughts?

Making backup is only for

Posted by monil on February 4, 2012 at 12:16pm

Making backup is only for making you sure that if a problem happened during installation, your website is safe and you can restore it to previous status. Maybe some updates change database, but i think this suggestion is only for making you sure about the health of your website.

I love Drupal CMS

Re: Making backups is only for

Posted by gcbound on February 7, 2012 at 12:06am

Thanks for the reply. It looks like if there were any schema changes for a minor update, you'd be able to find them through the update.php script for the new version? Would any queries done for that show up in the regular logging report if enabled (dblog?)

Yes, update.php shows all

Posted by monil on February 7, 2012 at 10:24am

Yes, update.php shows all available updates for both Drupal core and modules/themes you installed on your website.