Drupal core security updates are fortunately not a very regular occurence, but they've been notorious for making site managers or system administrators weak at the knees thinking about the potential risk or pain in upgrading.. even though it is usually pretty straightforward!
Let's face it, no-one likes having to rip out their sites directory and move it around into a new core, run all the updates etc. It's not fun, and you'd rather be busy improving your awesomeness somewhere else.
Well fortunately, Ægir exists, people, and it makes upgrades trivial, thanks to the Migrate logic that's built right into it.
Today I'll run through some quick steps on how to migrate a Drupal site from Drupal-6.13 to Drupal-6.14 which was released 'today' (excuse the timezones) in an Ægir system running 0.3 versions of all components (Hostmaster, Hosting, Provision).
The same or similar steps could be followed if you are using Open Atrium as a Platform and need to migrate your intranet from 1.0-beta1 or 2 to 1.0-beta3, which includes the Drupal 6.14 core security update.
If you want to watch this process in real time, Development Seed released a screencast of the upgrade process in Ægir right at the same time as I published this post!
Step 1 - Download Drupal-6.14
We'll do this with Drush. Become your Ægir user on your system. If you are the root user, this is done likeso:
su -s /bin/sh aegir
Navigate to /var/aegir/ and download Drupal-6.14 with drush:
aegir@server:~$ /var/aegir/drush/drush.php dl drupal Project drupal (6.14) downloaded to /var/aegir/drupal-6.14/.
Step 2 - Create the Platform
Now that we have the Drupal-6.14 core in place on the server, we can create a new Platform in Ægir.
Step 3 - Verify your existing site
This is just a good idea as a precautionary step before migrating: similar to running an apt-get update before trying to install or upgrade a package in a Debian-based distribution. This step ensures that Ægir's got a completely up to date understanding of your site and what modules etc are installed.
Step 4 - Migrate the site
Time to Migrate! Simply click the Migrate tab, and you'll be presented with a table of available platforms on your Ægir system and their respective modules, themes and install profiles present on each. Ægir is intelligent enough to point out to you which platforms the site will be able to be migrated onto, and which ones are incompatible (obvious here: a Drupal 5 platform, which I'm naughty and haven't upgraded yet.. this is just a test system :) )
So you will want to just select the Drupal 6.14 platform and click Migrate to kick out the jams!
Step 5 - Review, and beer
Hopefully all has gone well here. Ægir is sensible and loves your data: it will make a backup of your existing site, files and database, and drop them in the /var/aegir/backups dir. It uses this backup to then deploy your site on the new platform. If it all goes bad somehow, Ægir will roll back the changes and the task will fail. Your site should still be running as it was while you peruse the task output to find out what went wrong. Even if something disastrous happens during this, you'll still have the pre-migrate backup in /var/aegir/backups, with which you can restore from using the 'Restore' task available in the site's node view in Ægir.
That's it! If you run into any troubles, encounter bugs, or simply need some advice, please submit a bug or support request in the Ægir Issue queues or drop by #aegir in IRC on Freenode - either myself or one of the other developers, along with a bunch of awesome community users will likely be around to help you out.
Have fun, and enjoy the extra time you'll have to be awesome now that Ægir rules your Drupal stack!
Problem in creating site+aegir
i performed all the neccessary steps mentioned in the followin link.
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/may/20/aegir-scratch-installing-aeg... ...
there is option in create content to create site and platform. but while creating site it shows please fill a valid profile. so site s not getting created. Any solution to this ??? Thanks... :)
@Anonymous, you've used a
@Anonymous, you've used a very old Howto to install Aegir: that screencast was for 0.2 rc1. You should install using the INSTALL.txt and the instructions therein and see if your luck improves.
Just Patch It!
I've been using Ægir this week, and am failing to understand something. Why would I want to migrate every single site to a new platform, and deal with the inevitable errors that Ægir introduces? Instead I can simply patch the current platform, run a verify job on it, and everything is good.
Sure, Ægir has it's place. But its place clearly isn't in the handling of upgrades to Drupal core. And it's even worse when it comes to handling updates to modules.
Hi Kærast, I could offer a
Hi Kærast, I could offer a vague answer to your vague question regarding 'inevitable errors', but I won't :) If you really experienced errors doing a migrate, you might want to consider opening up a Support request, or a bug if you feel it's one, in the issue queues.
If you want to patch your current platform, and that works for you, great.
If I were you and Ægir didn't do the job I needed it to do, I'd either fix it and thus contribute to make it better, or not use it! :)
I agree with you that Ægir's place is not in the handling of upgrades: it's place is in the managing of sites and platforms. Since a Migrate task *can* provide the transition of sites between drupal core upgrades, that makes core upgrades possible. You might also pause to note that drush doesn't handle upgrades to core either, in the way it does with contrib modules. Ægir managing module updates might become a feature in the future - and there is a lot of work on this already being done in Drupal 7.
Although it seem easy to use,
Although it seem easy to use, you need to be prepared and save your site's content just in case something wrong would happen while you migrate. I guess some issues can be detected only when you try to apply it on your site. There should be made improvements soon, so it won't cause the same problems to the it's future users.
Harry at Drupal implementations
Yes, one should always backup
Yes, one should always backup first :)
The Migrate task itself *does* make a backup of the site and database before it does anything with it. You can see the backup get generated in the task log of the Migration, whether the Migration fails or not. This backup can be restored using the 'provision restore' command.
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