Maintaining Drupal Sites
xyber - October 2, 2009 - 19:19
Hi All,
I have a number of drupal sites. I've grown curious over a few issues.
#1 Is there no auto-update feature for drupal/modules which users can specify the ftp logins so that the updating can be automated? I know wordpress does.
#2 Is there a way to manage all the sites at once? Like update all the core/modules files at one go. Look at the sites statistics. Generate backups or even create new sites. Is there? I know that you can have multiple installation but how do you manage them.
Thank you for any pointers in advance.
-Xyber.
There's currently no
There's currently no equivalent to the Wordpress auto-update thing (but remember, that's only been part of Wordpress core since the last release). It's been said it's too much of a security issue, but it is unfortunate - I find it super useful in Wordpress.
You can automate some stuff with drush (http://drupal.org/project/drush ) but you still have to run the DB update script manually as far as I know.
If you have enough control of your server, you can use the Multisite Manager (I don't think it will work with shared hosting). http://drupal.org/project/multisite_manager
Without some multisite manager, I actually find it easier to manage all sites separately for now. Hopefully this will change.
Why separate sites? Here's a possible scenario
Site 1 uses modules 1, 2 (in /all), 3, 4 (in /site1.com)
Site 2 uses modules 1, 2 (in /all), 5, 6 (in /site2.com)
A new version of module 1 comes out. You take both sites offline and put them in maintenance mode. Now you FTP over the new version of module 1. You run update.php on Site 1. All goes well.
You run update.php on site 2 and find out that there's some sort of conflict with the new version of module 1 and module 5 and you need to upgrade module 5 (assuming there's a patch), but for various reasons/dependencies, you don't have the time for this. Now you're a bit stuck.
As the number of site and the configuration of modules and themes increases and the variety increases, I just found this to be a huge hassle (and I'm only managing a handful of sites). I've finally thrown in the towel and started managing all of my sites separately, no shared code.
The advantage is that I only need to put one site into maintenance mode at a time and it's easier to roll back changes if something goes wrong.
Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)
Well see, what i mean was to
Well see, what i mean was to have like some sort of a central control for all the drupal sites i have. True it may have different modules for each site. I am not looking to make all sites the same. What i want is to manage all the sites from this central control. Its like this:
From this central control, i am able to see what each individual site modules are. And i can just auto update them from the central control as i like, backup, restore etc. Get me? The closest thing i saw to this was the Aegir project. I have root access to my server but am not confident as it is a CPanel server. I am afraid i might make the server go loopey or if there are conflicting configs between these two.
-Xyber.
Aegir was the other one I was
Aegir was the other one I was trying to think of.
I think that's the best you can do for now.
Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)