Upgrading a Subversion-integrated Drupal site, part 2

Submitted by Eric.London on 2/3/2009

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Back in December 2008 I posted a blog entry on how to upgrade a subversion integrated Drupal site. This procedure was based on the process of unpacking the new Drupal installation, copying the sites folder into the new Drupal installation, and checking everything back into subversion. Although this is the recommended and cleanest way to upgrade Drupal, it may be a hassle if you have a huge repository and lots of files. So why not just overwrite the old directory with the new Drupal files? Well first of all, it would be good to take into consideration file deletions; and second, I've always been the kind of person who believes in fresh installs. I'd rather reinstall my operation system versus upgrading it. If you insist on overwriting the files, here's how you can do it...

Go to /admin/reports/updates to checkout which version your currently running and which is recommended. Download the new version of Drupal, along with the current version of your Drupal installation. If you can't find the current version, look for the "View all releases" link here: http://drupal.org/project/drupal

$ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.8.tar.gz
$ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.9.tar.gz

Next, unpack both of the files:

$ tar -xzf drupal-6.8.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf drupal-6.9.tar.gz

Now, use the diff command to compare the directories:

$ diff -r -q drupal-6.8 drupal-6.9

You'll see a lines of output that resemble the following:

Files drupal-6.8/CHANGELOG.txt and drupal-6.9/CHANGELOG.txt differ

Files that differ are OK, we can easily copy them into our current installation and check them in as modifications. To ignore those lines, we can run the previous command and tack on a grep statement to ignore them:

$ diff -r -q drupal-6.8 drupal-6.9 | grep -iv differ$

Hopefully, the previous command will return no output. If the diff command returned any output, it's probably telling you a file exists in one version and not the other. You'll have to manually resolve these subversion changes.

If the previous diff command returned no output, the new Drupal installation can be simply be copied on top of your current installation. But first, let's keep track of how many changes there were. NOTE: the next command assumes your current Drupal environment is up to date (the HEAD revision) and every file has been checked into the repository prior to the upgrade.

# check how many file modifications there are:
$ diff -r -q drupal-6.8 drupal-6.9 | wc -l
83

# copy the files into your current Drupal installation:
$ cp -r drupal-6.9/* /path/to/your/drupal/installation/httpdocs/

# verfiy the same number of file modifications:
$ svn stat /path/to/your/drupal/installation/httpdocs/ | grep ^M | wc -l
83

If the numbers match, run the update.php script. And if all went well, commit the changes:

$ svn commit /path/to/your/drupal/installation/httpdocs/ -m "Upgraded Drupal from 6.8 to 6.9"

process change update

Submitted by Eric.London on Wed, 05/20/2009 - 13:37.

Our company is in the process of transitioning all our Drupal sites to a shared Drupal installation (single installation filesystem, numerous databases, etc), where all the SVN projects will start at the "sites" folder. We plan on using CVS to handle Drupal versions and Subversion to handle the projects sites folders. More info to follow...

svn:externals for upgrades

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 15:49.

I’ve adopted a system that works pretty well for me, and makes upgrading core pretty trivial (without having to worry about clobbering .svn directories):

Let’s say I’ve got a project repository at http://mysvnrepos/svn/myproject/trunk.

In my project root, I create a myproject-sites directory, which contains the usual ‘sites’ directory structure (default/settings.php, all/modules, all/themes, etc.)
Elsewhere in my svn repository I set up drupal-core directory… something like http://mysvnrepos/svn/drupal-core
I check in a complete copy of Drupal core, minus the sites, directory under drupal-core, so I wind up with drupal-core/5.15, drupal-core/6.9, etc.
Now I go back to my project root and do svn propedit svn:externals ., and set up the following:

drupal http://mysvnrepos/svn/drupal-core/6.9
drupal/sites http://mysvnrepos/svn/myproject/trunk/myproject-sites

Once the externals are set, you should be able to do an svn update from the project root, and it will pull down both Drupal core and your project-specific sites directory into a drupal directory.

When Drupal 6.10 comes out, just check the new version (minus the sites directory) into your drupal-core repository, update your project externals, and pull the new core down.

-Andy
http://proofgroup.com
http://andychase.net

good idea

Submitted by Eric.London on Fri, 02/06/2009 - 13:43.

Good idea, Andy. At Lucidus, we've moved our SVN repositories to a service based website called SpringLoops. It allows us to setup automatic revision deployments and multiple environments for project. Might work well for this...