Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
The migration module (currently only on github, and only works with Drupal 6.x) helps Drupal system/site administrators migrate arbitrary changes between multiple versions/environments of the same Drupal website. As outlined in this short guide, one way to track changes for later migration is by (a) making changes to a Drupal site (on a local developer machine, for instance) then (b) encoding these changes in a hook_update_N function.
Documentation on the migration module:
For more modern situations you'll want to refer to the Migrate page instead.