As we subscribe to the Acquia Network I received an email this morning detailing some important security updates to the Drupal core. I was particlarly impressed with the speed at which Acquia had made the updates available. As described in a previous post, I’ve setup svn to manage our Drupal servers, so now was a good time to see if the process worked in real life.
Having a quick scan through the security advisories for Drupal it was claer that these issues need to be addressed. I headed over to Acquia downloads and selected the Acquia Drupal upgrade (.zip) download as this just contained the files that had been updated. Once I’d extracted the files I read the UPGRADE.txt for details of what to do.
Next job was to backup the existing site and database files. Although I could recover from svn if I needed to, I’m a bit paranoid about upgrades, so having local copies never hurts. I put the site into offline mode and zipped all the the apache doc root. Next I used the handy backup and migrate module to perform a manual backup of the database. (I also use this for scheduled backups every 12 hours.)
Just to make sure I was up to date with my svn repo I also ran svn status in my apache root directory – all good.
Time to upgrade, so I stopped apache and MySQL and copied over the updated files into my apache root directory. Once I’d restarted apache and MySQL I logged in to make sure everything looked OK and it was. I also noticed on the system status screen that a couple of modules (ChaosTools and Panels) had updates, so I downloaded and installed these as well. As suggested in the UPGRADE.txt I ran update.php and cron.php before putting the site abck online. Everything was working as expected, so I committed the changes to the svn repo.
I then repeated shutdown and backup process on the live server and ran svn up in my apache root. It’s incredible that those 2 little words do so much! The development server was now updated and all my code was in sync. After resrting the services and running update/cron and a few test it was all done. The whole process too less time than writing it up in this post, which is nice.
