Upgrading a website software version is one of the highest risk task a webmaster encounters when managing a website. Upgrading from Drupal 7? Here is a small guide with various details. Let’s start with general info : The content of your site does not live in your Drupal installation. It lives in a MySQL database which is managed by your Drupal installation. This database will sit somewhere on your server, as determined by your web host. (As an aside, I never did figure out where Dev Desktop puts the database on your computer at home. It’s a mystery.) Anyhow, the exception to this is that the images within your site do live in your Drupal installation, they are in the sites folder somewhere (depending on your settings), with Drupal keeping records of them in the database.
First of all, make a list of all the contributed modules on your current website. Next, check whether these modules have a Drupal 8 compatible version. In case of unavailability of the Drupal 8 version, the migration process will suffer. Fortunately, Drupal 8 has come a long way and many of the major modules now do support Drupal 8. You can check all the available update paths through the Migrate UI modules. When done with the installation of the modules, you will have to navigate to the upgrade path. For this, go to www.yoursite.com/upgrade (remember to replace yoursite with the name of your Drupal 8 website). You will be brought to the following screen. Please make sure you follow the directions on the screen before proceeding.
If you’re migrating from a previous version of Drupal, start with our Preparing for a Drupal-to-Drupal Migration tutorial. From there you’ll learn how to perform a basic update using either the built in UI or the contributed Drush commands, as well as some common best practices to help things go as smoothly as possible. If you’re looking to customize your Drupal-to-Drupal migration a bit, continue through the tutorials on writing custom migrations, and then we’ll go in-depth on how to use those skills to tailor the Drupal-to-Drupal update process to your specific use-case.
Download the latest release of the distribution. Download and extract the latest release and copy your existing site’s Drupal 7 version settings.php file and files directory to the sites/default directory in the distribution install. This will point the new site to your existing site database.
The steps above outline how to get a distribution minimally installed on an existing site. But you’ll still have a lot of work to do to reconcile your existing site content and structure with what has been created by the distribution. Here are a few tips to get you started–but you should begin with the assumption that there will be lots more you’ll discover and need to fix. Most distributions are built using the Features module, which allows exporting configuration from a Drupal site – content types, fields, views, and so on – into code, so that it can be enabled on multiple sites. For components like content types and fields to be exportable, they need to have a “machine name”–a unique name that will be the same on every site they’re enabled on. For example, a date-type field used to store the date of an event might have the machine name field_date. See extra details about Migrating to Drupal 8.