How to do a Drupal 8 upgrade

Updating a website script version is one of the most complicated procedure a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Drupal 7 Migration? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : Be careful where you put your optional modules and themes. Within the folders of your Drupal installation, there is a folder called ‘modules’ and one called ‘themes.’ These are NOT where you should put any contributed modules and themes that you add to your core installation. These folders are just for the core modules and themes. The folders you should use are a second set also called modules and themes, which sit within the ‘sites’ folder in your Drupal installation.

Note: Earlier, there used to be a migrate_plus module in Drupal 8 core which contained all the pieces of migrate functionality that wasn’t able to make it in the Drupal 7 core. It contained all the plugins for the support of XML, CSV and JSON data sources along with the support for databases like MS SQL or Oracle. This module has now been split into different modules, namely migrate_plus, migrate_tools and migrate_source_csv. Though not yet perfect, the upgrade procedure in Drupal has come quite a long way. As you can see in this tutorial, the upgrade process is now very streamlined and is an integral part of the Drupal Core. If you liked this blog post, then give a read to another blog post by us on, How To Update Drupal 8 Core.

Upgrading is the process of moving your site from a previous major version of Drupal to a newer version, for example from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. This consists of upgrading the codebase to the appropriate version and then migrating the data from your old site into the new one. Drupal 8 core contains two modules to help facilitate this process: Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI.

Here are basic steps to take to upgrade an existing Drupal site to use a distribution. These are rough guidelines only. Because each site and each distribution is configured differently, you’re likely to run into additional complexities. But these notes should at least get you started in the right direction. Select a distribution to use. You’ll want to find the distribution that most closely matches your site requirements. See the listings and comparisons of Drupal distributions on drupal.org.

The steps above outline how to get a distribution minimally installed on an existing site. But you’ll still have a lot of work to do to reconcile your existing site content and structure with what has been created by the distribution. Here are a few tips to get you started–but you should begin with the assumption that there will be lots more you’ll discover and need to fix. If the distribution is installed from scratch, we can be sure that the components we’re creating won’t conflict with existing components on the site. But when we’re converting an existing site into a one based on a distribution, there’s the potential that a component we’re creating will have the same name as one that already exists on the site. In certain cases, such a conflict can cause a site error that’s difficult to resolve. Read more details at Migrating from Drupal 7.