Upgrading from previous versions

The Drupal Project is constantly being updated through the work of many talented people (see The Drop is Always Moving!).

As a site owner or administrator, you should plan on regular upgrades to your site installation (both Drupal Core as well as contributed modules you are using). This section details upgrading your Drupal installation. It covers both major and minor version upgrades to your Drupal site.

Are you in the right place? If you are a contributed module maintainer looking for information on how to upgrade your contributed module, please see the Updating Modules section of the Developer Guide handbook. If you are a themer looking to update your theme, see Converting a Theme to a Later Drupal Version in the Theming Guide handbook.

A few notes:

• Warning: As with any software upgrade it is critical for you to have a current, tested backup of your site.
• At any given time, only two major versions of Drupal are supported. At time of writing, 6.x is the latest major version, and 5.x is still supported, so 4.x is no longer supported.
• If you are upgrading from one minor version to another, within the same major version (e.g. from 6.0 to 6.3), it is fine to skip -- you do not need to install all the minor versions in between.
• If you are upgrading from one major version to another (e.g. from 4.7 to 6.10), you should not go directly. The sequence to follow is:
  1. Upgrade to the latest minor version in the major version you're currently on (e.g. if you are on 5.5 and want to upgrade to 6.10, and there is a 5.12 version out, upgrade to 5.12 first).
  2. Then jump to the latest minor version in the next major version (e.g. if you were on 4.7, your next step would be 5.12, or whatever the latest 5.x version is).
  3. Continue this until you get to the version you want to stop at.
• You can find information on upgrading in three locations -- be sure to read all of it carefully before you upgrade:
  1. The UPGRADE.txt file packaged with your Drupal files.
  2. The page announcing the release of your version (e.g. http://drupal.org/drupal-6.2 for Drupal 6.2). You may also need to check the release pages of earlier versions if you are upgrading by more than one minor version (e.g. from 6.0 to 6.2).
  3. The other pages of this handbook section.

References

• Backup of The Database and Existing Files
• Screencast: Upgrading from Drupal 5.x to 6.x
• Screencast: Upgrading to Drupal 5
• Screencast: Drupal Upgrade Tutorial for upgrading from one version of 6.x to another

Having Problems?
For problems during your site upgrade, instead of commenting here, please read the project page and, if necessary, post an issue there:

• Drupal Core project page
• the project page of the contrib module of interest - like http://drupal.org/project/views - for the Views module for example
• or try the http://drupal.org/support page