Drupal Tutorial

Please, make sure that you have a full backup of your Drupal site before you go on with the upgrade procedure. For the example, we assume that you have installed an outdated version of Drupal into a sub folder of your domain (e.g. at www.yourdomainname.com/drupal)

Chapter 1: First, point your browser to the official Drupal site and download the latest stable release of Drupal on your local hard drive.

When the download is complete, you should upload the new version of Drupal on your website. The safest way to do that is to create a new folder in the public_html folder of your website, e.g. drupal_new, and upload the new version files there. Then, extract them through cPanel -> File Manager.

Chapter 2: When you have uploaded the new version in the drupal_new folder, you should copy the neccesary files and folders from the old version of Drupal to the new one. For the example, we assume that you already have a full backup of your live Drupal site. Please, navigate to the backup folder of your Drupal site and copy the file .htaccess and the sites and the files directories and upload them into the folder drupal_new by overwriting any existing files.

You should navigate to your cPanel -> File manager -> public_html -> drupal_new/sites/default folder and open the settings.php file for editing. Enter the following line:

$update_free_access = TRUE;

Now, save the changes. The above changes will let you run the update.php script from your browser.

Chapter 3: The next thing to do is to update the database of your Drupal. In your browser, please type the following URL:

http://yourdomainname.com/drupal_new/update.php

where yourdomainname.com is replaced with your actual domain name.

Please, click the button Continue and follow the instructions. If there are no errors reported, you have successfully updated your Drupal application.

Great job! Due to a better security we should turn the $update_free_access variable back to false in the settings.php file:

$update_free_access = FALSE;

Please, open a new window in your browser and point it to the site which has just been upgraded.

As we performed the upgrade in a test folder drupal_new you should point your browser to: http://yourdomainname.com/drupal_new/ .

When you are sure that the upgraded version of the site works wonders you can delete or rename the old folder to drupal_old and rename drupal_new to drupal to put the new version live.