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By DirtyBirdNJ on
Hello I am currently developing a site in Drupal 6, and I really like it. Unfortounately, the updates that provide greater security etc, always catch me by surprise.
Is there any blog/rss feed I can subscribe to that will help me know, a week or a couple days in advance of when a new release of Drupal is imminent? It would be much easier to plan time for the upgrade if it wasn't unexpected.
It is very tedious to disable every module by hand, it usually takes me 2 or 3 passes to get all the modules disabled. Then I have to do a DB backup, and then I can delete/add all the Drupal files. The DB backup is a seperate topic, but are there any ways to automate the disabling/enabling of all or selected modules?
How do you guys manage updating installs, more importantly installs of clients whom are not actively being worked on? Do you have some email notification and then go and manually do each update? This is the only way I can see it happening, though I have not investigated much into how much the process can be automated. I know some of the update process has to be manual, because you need to see if any errors have arisen, but how do you balance that with the simplicty of having the system update itself?
While I am competent in performing the upgrades, at some point this website will be run by the client and I need to develop a workflow to hand-hold them through the upgrade process. Any suggestions, comments, criticizms are welcome.
Comments
Minor updates are released as
Minor updates are released as needed. There's no schedule or roadmap for these releases since no one can plan when a security problem will be found.
You can sign up for the security newsletter in your profile to get announcements sent to you.
Security updates
You will NOT get advance warning of security updates. Ever. Security problems are not made public until there is a fix. That is a feature, not a bug.
I don't actually know what the docs say, but there is no real reason to disable modules when updating point releases. It's wise to dump a copy of the database, of course.
Major releases (5 to 6, for example) are a completely different matter.
You only need to disable the
You only need to disable the modules when your are upgrading from 5 to 6. I know updates are annoying because almost every couple of days there's a new updated module, but you don't actually have to update it, read the release notes to see if it's a security update or only a minor bug release.
What I usually do is backup files and the database into my localhost then perform the update on the localhost, if there's any errors, they most likely will show up, if there's no errors, then you can perform the update on the production site. Most likely everything will go fine.
You can also install the update module and configure it to ignore some modules, like the ones who have patches and set an email to get notified when new updates are available. I didn't know about this until I was using drupal for 6 months.
Luis
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if you deploy drupal via cvs, updating is a single command-- and can be scripted along with the backup and update.php steps. Also, check out the http://drupal.org/project/contrib_toggle module.
Also
Security releases are generally on Wednesdays. :)
Michelle
Thanks everybody, those are
Thanks everybody, those are some really good suggestions. I especially like the toggle_contrib module.
I realize that not publishing that there are security issues is a good thing, I'm just trying to manage the seemingly random updates.
Also the idea of testing the updates on a local system is a good one too.
Thanks!