Appendix A. Installing and Upgrading Drupal
The first step to using Drupal, of course, is to actually get the software and install it. Drupal comes with an installation script that will walk you through a few screens to gather information and then set up your database and create your site settings file for you. Weâll look at everything you need to make that process run smoothly; youâll find that installing Drupal is quick and painless once some basic requirements are in place.
Once you have Drupal up and running, itâs important to keep your site up-to-date. New releases of contributed modules and Drupal core come out periodically to address critical security fixes, and itâs important to stay on top of updates as they are released. Weâll take a look at Drupal 7âs built-in Update Status module, which will notify you of updates available for your site, and weâll talk about the steps required to update both individual modules and the Drupal core itself from one version to another.
Note
You will notice that many people (and even Drupal coreâs documentation) use the terms âupdatingâ and âupgradingâ interchangeably. They both refer to replacing existing code with newer code.
Before You Begin Installation
Prior to installing Drupal, itâs important to make sure that you can actually do so, and understand a bit about how Drupal is structured. This section provides a checklist of Drupalâs requirements, and also highlights important things in the Drupal file structure ...
Get Using Drupal, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.