Target Audience: Website Administrator

Updating a Drupal site is vital for security as this CMS has often been the victim of destructive cyber attacks.

WARNING! Before you start, remember one thing: back up, back up, back up your site!

By way of example, the steps to follow to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 are as follows:

  1. Check for available updates;
  2. Download the latest version of your current version of Drupal;
  3. Extract the [tarball or zip] Drupal package;
  4. Set the site to maintenance mode;
  5. Delete all files and folders within the original Drupal instance with the exception of sites/ and its subfolders. This assumes that all custom work, including themes, is in the recommended location: sites/ folder tree. If custom changes have been made elsewhere, you should keep them or plan to replace them at a later date;
  6. Copy all folders and files except sites/ from within the extracted Drupal package to the location of the original Drupal instance;
  7. Some updates do not include changes to setting.php and some do. If the upgrade version includes changes to settings.php, you must replace your old settings.php in sites/default/ with the new one, then change site-specific entries (e.g. database name, user and password) in the settings file;
  8. If files such as .htaccess or robots.txt have been changed, apply the changes to the new files;
  9. If there is a favicon.ico file, replace this as well;
  10. Login to your site as administrator;
  11. Execute update.php by navigating to http://yourdrupalsitename/update.php* and follow the procedure to update your Drupal instance;
  12. Remember to disable maintenance mode.