Updating Drupal 7 Core Manually

Before You Begin

• The instructions below are for moving between different releases of the same major version of Drupal (e.g. 7.x, 8.x. etc.)  Please see our Site Migrations section for more details on moving to the next major version of Drupal, which is a much more involved process.

• If you are managing a Drupal 8 or later site via Composer, you do not want to use the following instructions, as all updates will be handled through composer.

• The instructions below assume your site is on a UNIX style web server and regularly reference the OIT Web Hosting environment.  If your site is hosted on a different kind of web server, then these instructions may have to be modified to work correctly for you.

• Additional information can be found on the Drupal.org page about minor version updates.

Drupal Core Upgrade Process

1. Open up a web browser and navigate to your Drupal site.
2. Log into the site as an Administrator.
3. Navigate to the Maintenance subsection of the Development section of your site's Configuration administration area (Configuration -> Development -> Maintenance) and enable the "Put site into maintenance mode" checkbox.  (Don't forget to save your change!)
4. Either via SSH/SFTP or (for sites on OIT Web Hosting) the Plesk Control Panel, make a backup of your site's filesystem.
   • If you are using SSH, you can navigate to your site's base directory and issue the following command:

     • tar czf ~/drupalbackup.tgz *

   • If you are on OIT Web Hosting, you should store your backup in the "private" folder like so:

     • tar czf ~/private/drupalbackup.tgz *

5. Backup your MySQL database.  On OIT Web Hosting, the easiest way to do this is to log into the Plesk Control Panel for you site and access phpMyAdmin via the Webadmin link in the Databases management section.  On the other hand, if you are on a stand-alone web server where you have direct access to mySQL commands, you can run a command like the following (be sure to insert the correct username, password, and database name for your particular website):

   • mysqldump -u USERNAME -p DATABASENAME > ~/backups/database-backup.sql

6. Rename the directory containing your Drupal installation or move the contents of the directory to another location.  With many shared hosting services, you won't be able to rename this directory, so your only choice will be to move its contents.  When moving the contents, be sure to get the .htaccess file from this directory so that you'll have it for reference later on.
7. If you were able to rename the directory containing your Drupal installation, then from that same parent directory, download and unpack the latest version of Drupal core (be sure to replace 'x' and 'y' with the right major and minor version numbers) and rename the new drupal-x.y directory to match the orignal name of your Drupal installation directory.

   • wget https://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.y.tar.gz

   • tar -xzvf drupal-x.y.tar.gz

   • mv drupal-x.y orignalDirectoryName

8. If you had to move the contents of your Drupal directory somewhere else, then make sure you are in that now empty directory and do the following:

   • wget https://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.y.tar.gz

   • tar -xzvf drupal-x.y.tar.gz

   • mv drupal-x.y/* drupal-x.y/.???* .

   • rmdir drupal-x.y

9. Move the following folders to your old Drupal directory to your new Drupal directory:

   • sites/

10. Return to your web browser and navigate to  https://yourSiteHostName/update.php.  Follow the prompts to apply any database table updates that are needed.
11. Check the administrative Status report to verify that everything is working as expected.
12. Navigate to the Maintenance subsection of the Development section of your site's Configuration administration area (Configuration -> Development -> Maintenance) and disable the "Put site into maintenance mode" checkbox.  (Don't forget to save your change!)