Managing and Maintaining Multiple Installations

Multi-Installation Management Utility?

I'm not sure if this is of any use to anyone else but just in case there are others out there with the same situation, I'd like to hear from you.

To save you a little reading time, this solution is built for the Windows Platform only since it uses Excel. However, the target managed environment can be any platform.

Disclaimer: I have no bias, one way or the other, for any platform - It's all "good" for me because it creates endless opportunity for my "real" job. I happen to have chosen to build this utility on the Windows platform because it was convenient for me and the tools I need exist there...

My "real job" is management consultant and not managing and maintaining Drupal (or other software) installations. Because I do a lot of research and consulting in both Commercial and Open Source architectures and applications, I seem to spend a lot of time helping friends and colleagues manage and maintain their environments.

The problem I am addressing is the maintenance and management of multiple software installation bases (evolved to 26 as of this writing), at any version of Drupal in a straightforward and consistent fashion. "Time is Money" and I do this as a favor for my friends/colleagues as well as my own consultancy. This is a time-saving utility for me because of the circumstances and it makes my friends and colleagues happy too!

I realize that Drupal has "built-in" capability to determine whether or not a module is up-to-date and I love that feature because it enables the site administrators to see exception conditions quickly. But as fate would have it, I find myself building and distributing multiple installations from similar (not identical) source bases on multiple versions of Drupal (and other products) on different operating systems. Over time, it became too unwieldy to perform updates to each individual installation. Moreover, the built-in feature only displays the current version for active modules and won't properly enable auto-updating on Windows deployments for myriad good and bad reasons. However, I supply (in my distribution baselines) a number of modules which the site administrators may or may not elect to use.

Rather than guess which ones they are using, this utility calculates the need for update based on what is present in the distribution folders {siteroot}\sites\all\modules, {siteroot}\sites\all\themes, etc.. I have written an application (Requires Excel) which enables me to manage and maintain multiple installations concurrently in one pass. It also gives me the capability to maintain an up-to-date repository of modules and themes from which the updates are deployed to any number of installation targets.

I am now able to update over 25 installations at various levels of Drupal in under 15 minutes. There's an added benefit from having this utility and it relates to my routine research. The result of the update process provides me with a completely up-to-date list of all modules which then enables me to answer questions of my clients such as:

"can you give me 'at a glance' a list of production (non dev) modules available in for the versions of Drupal we are using?"

By the way - The answer to that question as of this writing is:

• Version / Number of "Production" Modules
• 4.7.x / 326
• 5.x / 1009
• 6.x / 175
• Grand Total=1510

I understand that this may be too unique of a situation but am curious to know whether or not anyone else might benefit from using such a facility. I have been a long-time believer in appropriately applied Open Source solutions and hope that this may be of use and interest to others. This utility is also appropriate for other module/theme based distributions like WordPress, etc.

If you got this far, thank you for taking the time to read through the entire post ... I look forward to hearing from you if you have similar needs or are interested in learning more about how I went about solving this problem.