How does the upgrade to Drupal 9 work?

Dries Buytaert, founder of the famous open source CMS Drupal announced the official release of Drupal 9 which took place on June 3rd.

As we explained in our previous article, we can say that Drupal 9.0 is more of an update to 8.9 rather than a new release. It will allow Drupal to start again on new bases and to have new dependencies that will allow it to continue its evolution in order to offer new features in future versions of Drupal 9.

If you are planning to migrate to Drupal 9 for your website, are you familiar with how you're going to do it?

You have a project with Drupal?

What are the steps involved in migrating to Drupal 9?

First of all, whether it's for a site redesign or a migration, you need to be concerned about the qualification of the modules even if their compatibility with Drupal 8 is assured.

Please note that if your project has not kept up with the latest Drupal 8 updates, then you must do so from your version up to version 8.9. This will make it easier to change versions.

Then, in order to make a successful transition between the two versions, it will be necessary to follow 4 distinct steps:

• The installation of the "Update Status" module: first you can download all the dependencies that are linked to this module and then you can install it via the Drupal 8 back office.

"Update status" is a module that analyzes your code base to find deprecation with the help of Drupal-check which is a command line tool. It also analyzes code from contributed and custom projects already installed by yourself to give you a report of obsolete code that you will need to replace before upgrading to the next major release. Another attraction of this module is that it also suggests available project updates to keep your site up to date. It will also allow you to avoid depreciation errors over the long term.

• Update contrib modules: with the use of Update Status, you have to select via the interface the whole list of contrib modules you want to scan and see if they are up to date.
• Updating custom modules: they must also be scanned by "Update Status" in order to check the quality of the code while identifying clear errors that need to be corrected quickly.
• Upgrading the core of Drupal to Drupal 9: using specific commands you can update it. You can also use Update Manager which is a module in the Drupal core that allows you to scan it and the modules that are part of it and the contrib modules used. It also allows you to see which Update is available (Core Drupal or Modules contrib). However, it does not scan custom modules, which means that the update must be done by a developer.

Let's discuss your project!

Esokia and its dedicated team of Drupal experts will take care of your digital project whether it is for the redesign or the creation of a website. In addition, our developers are prepared to take care of your migration to the new version.

With more than a hundred sites that we have developed on this CMS, we have also referenced major groups such as Lactalis, Sun Resorts, Swisslife and SBM (State Bank of Mauritius).

If you have any questions or need advice for your project, don't hesitate to contact us!

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