CODEWITHSUNDEEP
drupal
Rosamunda
Rosamunda

Reputation: 14990

How to minimize downtime when upgrading all files of a site and there are lots of tweaks to do?

I need to make some big upgrades in my site (it´s a Drupal 6 site, and I´m upgrading it to Drupal 7), and it´s going to take me a while to complete all the items I need to change (I have to do some tweaks after upgrading all into the Drupal 7 version because some modules have different configurations). If all goes ok, it should take me just a day, but something could go wrong.

So, what´s the best solution to do a clean transition and have the site offline just for a couple of minutes?

I thought about cloning my site to another folder (and maybe assigning it one of my unused domains for an easier access while working with it), and then do the upgrades inside the cloned account.

So when ready, I would just point my domain to the new cloned folder.

The only downtime would be the time it takes the registrar to change the pointing domain...

What do you do when you need to upgrade a site and do stuff that´s going to take you a while?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 113

Answers (1)

Dane Hillard
Dane Hillard

Reputation: 900

Your approach for cloning the website's document root to another location and making sure it all works is what is called "staging" an upgrade, and it is a widely practiced method of ensuring short downtime. It gives you the ability to test your updates before you release them, which is great. Assigning an unused domain is nice because then you can test in a deployed (rather than local) way.

Upvotes: 1

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