Drupal Upgade

How to Upgrade your Drupal Application?

Here we will explain in simple steps how you can upgrade your Drupal application to the latest stable version.

Before you proceed with the upgrade procedure, please make sure that you have a full backup of your Drupal site.

We assume that your have an outdated version of Drupal installed into a sub folder of your domain (e.g. at www.yourdomainname.com/drupal)

Step 1: The first step is to point your browser to the official Drupal site and download the latest stable release of Drupal on your local harddrive.

Once the download is complete, you need to upload the new version of Drupal on your website. The safest way to do that is to create a new folder in the public_html folder of your website, e.g. drupal_new, and upload the new version files there. Then you need to extract them through cPanel -> File Manager.

Step 2: Once you have the new version uploaded in the drupal_new folder, you should copy the neccesary files and folders from the old version of Drupal to the new one. Here we assume that you already have a full backup of your live Drupal site. Please, navigate to the backup folder of your Drupal site and copy the .htaccess file and the sites and the files directories and upload them into the drupal_new folder by overwriting any existing files.

Now, please, navigate to your cPanel -> File manager -> public_html -> drupal_new/sites/default folder and open the settings.php file for editing. Enter the following line:

$update_free_access = TRUE;

Save the changes. The changes above will allow you to run the update.php script from your browser.

Step 3: We are almost done. The next step is to update the database of your Drupal.

In your browser, please type the following URL:

http://yourdomainname.com/drupal_new/update.php,

where yourdomainname.com is replaced with your actual domain name. The screen should look similar to the one below.

Click on the Continue button and follow the instructions.

If there are no errors reported, then your Drupal application is now up to date. Congratulations!

Due to security reasons we should turn the $update_free_access variable back to false in the settings.php file:

$update_free_access = FALSE;

We are now done :) Open a new window in your browser and point it to the site you've just upgraded. As we performed the upgrade in a test folder drupal_new you should point your browser to: http://yourdomainname.com/drupal_new/

Once you are sure that the upgraded version of site works like a charm you can delete or rename the old folder to drupal_old and rename drupal_new to drupal in order to put the new version live.

We're now done. Congratulations! Your site now uses the latest stable version of Drupal.

Please, feel free to contact us if you have any questions or recommendations about this tutorial at: tutorials 'at' siteground.com