Scenario

You see the following message when visiting your Administer page:

There is a security update available for your version of Drupal. To ensure the security of your server, you should update immediately! See the available updates page for more information.

You immediately update your core Drupal installation.

HowTo

To update your Drupal installation, you will need to complete six easy steps

1. download Drupal
2. prepare Drupal for upload
3. put your website into Maintenance mode
4. backup your Drupal installation
5. use FTP to update Drupal
6. put your Drupal installation back online

Step 1: Download Drupal

To download Drupal

• Go to http://drupal.org/
• Select "Latest release: 6.x"
• Select "Download Drupal 6.x"
• Save Drupal 6.x to your computer

Step 2: Prepare Drupal for upload

To prepare Drupal for upload to the web, you will need to unpack the Drupal tar.gz file. To unpack Drupal,

• launch a file-decompression program, like 7-Zip
• use your file-decompression program to open drupal-6.x.tar.gz
• double-click drupal-6.x.tar.gz
  • Change of state: drupal-6 .x .tar .gz become drupal-6.x.tar
• double-click drupal-6.x.tar
  • Change of state: drupal-6 .x .tar become drupal-6.x file folder
• copy the drupal-6.x file folder to your desktop

Step 3: Put your website into Maintenance mode

Before you can upload the latest release of Drupal, you must put your site into Maintenance mode.

Warning: If you do not put your Drupal site into maintenance mode, you could corrupt your website database when updating your Drupal installation.

To put your website into Maintenance mode

• login to your website administrator account (e.g., admin)
• go to Administer | Site Configuration | Site Maintenance
• change site status from "online" to "offline"
• save configuration

Do not close this window. You will need to get back to this window to put your site back on-line when you finish the update process.

If you do close your Site Maintenance window, you can always get back to it by navigating to navigating to your homepage and then adding "admin/settings/site-maintenance" to your website URL.

Step 4: Backup your Drupal installation

In some rare circumstances, you may corrupt your website during the upgrade procedure. To protect yourself against this possibility, you will need to backup your website files and databases.

To perform a website backup,

• login to your CPanel
• select Backups
• select Partial Backups | Download a Home Directory Backup | Home Directory
  • save to desktop
• select your database from Partial Backups | Download a MySQL Database Backup
  • save to desktop

Use FTP to update Drupal

You will use FTP to update your Drupal installation.

To update Drupal using FTP

• use your FTP client (like Filezilla to login to your website
  • Follow the instructions provided by your website hosting service.
• mirror your local and web directories
  • Navigate to your new Drupal installation on the left or local side of your FTP interface
  • Navigate to your existing Drupal installation on the right or remote side of your FTP interface
• upload all of the Drupal files and folders, moving them from the local (left) to the remote (right) site of the FTP interface

Important: You have updated your Drupal installation

Put your website back online

Now that you have updated your Drupal installation, you may put your website back online.

To take your website out of maintenance mode

• go to Administer | Site Configuration | Site Maintenance
• change site status from "offline" to "online"
• save configuration

If you see no error message, then you succeeded in updating your Drupal installation.