Introduction to Drupal 8 Upgrade
Upgrading a website software version is one of the most complicated procedure a webmaster has to deal with when managing a website. Upgrading from Drupal 7? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with basic info : What the heck is this Drupal thing anyway? OK, so my best understanding of this is that it’s a little software package. It’s written in a language called PHP. It’s made up of core modules which you can download from http://drupal.org/project/drupal, and a bunch of optional (or “contributed”) modules, which you can surf at http://drupal.org/project/modules. All of this then sits around in a little set of folders.
When you are done with setting up a local Drupal 8 website, navigate to the Extend tab of the new website and verify that the three main migrate modules (Migrate, Migrate Drupal and Migrate Upgrade) are present in the Core (experimental) section. After proceeding, you will be brought to the Migrate UI where you can check all the potential issues and errors that you might encounter as well as all the available and the missing paths. Go through this screen and when satisfied, start the migration.
Whether you’re updating from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7, or importing data from some other source, you need to know about the migrate system in Drupal 8. This guide provides a comprehensive look at the features of the Drupal 8 migrate API for both Drupal-to-Drupal updates, and migrating from any external datastore into Drupal.
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.
Download the latest release of the distribution. Download and extract the latest release and copy your existing site’s Drupal 7 version settings.php file and files directory to the sites/default directory in the distribution install. This will point the new site to your existing site database.
There are several tips and best practices to follow to help you prepare for the upgrade. Still, since this is such a complex process, we highly recommend getting members of your development team involved from the beginning, which will help ensure the upgrade goes as smoothly as possible. Upgrading to Drupal 8 is more similar to building a new website than previous Drupal updates were, meaning that you should never perform the upgrade to Drupal 8 on a live site. It’s also strongly recommended that you create a backup of your live site so that if anything goes awry, you can quickly roll the site back to an earlier version while you figure out what the issue is. See extra info on Upgrading to Drupal 8.