Constant Acquia Drupal Releases
What is the policy on releasing new versions of Acquia?
I think it gets to be a bit much when we need to upgrade our sites within a couple of weeks of eachother.
Isn't there a way to roll up these releases into a less frequent release schedule, instead of a new version every few weeks? it's hard to justify taking down production sites for every recent AD release.
Hi Stephen, There's
Hi Stephen,
There's definitely not much that can be done when releases include security updates. It would be a Bad Thing to just hang on to a security release rather than getting it out ASAP.
The best thing you can do is use a host which support SVN (as we do) which makes upgrading rather simple and painless.
On our servers if you have installed Acquia using SVN then it is a simple matter of making sure you have a backup of the database, a backup of your document root, and then logging into the server and typing "svn up" and then hitting the update.php file.
It shouldn't be necessary to take down a production server for this, or at least not for anything longer than about 60-90 seconds. We have customers who pay us to do the upgrade for them, and when we have a site backed up we are capable of performing an upgrade which if it should fail can roll back to the pre-update version (including database) all in a matter of minutes - actually we can do it in seconds and never hit the minute or minutes mark.
------
HotDrupal.com
Drupal Friendly Hosting
Paul Schopf
I agree with HotDrupal -
I agree with HotDrupal - Given the speed with which exploiters jump on a new vulnerability, I want to keep my site really up to date. The svn update is great. I use phpmyadmin to back up the database.
The difficulty I have is that the contributed modules that are outside the acquia tree are not so easily upgraded. I have tried using cvs, but what I really want is an option to select the "latest stable 6.x release".
At any rate, keep the releases coming!
Joshua Brauer
Hi Stephen, The other folks
Hi Stephen,
The other folks have covered some of the key things here pretty well. It is necessary that Acquia Drupal be released in a timely manner after a security release of Drupal core or one of the included contributed modules is released. If you are in a position to use Acquia's SVN repository this may help make your upgrades simpler.
Another consideration is that each release includes release notes about what is included in each release. You can compare the list of changes and security fixes against what is in use on your site and choose to delay the upgrade until a time that is better for you if you are not affected. You can expect that the release notes will indicate if there is a problem that leaves sites vulnerable even if they are not running a module. (It has been quite a while since such a vulnerability was in Drupal).
Thanks,
Josh
Acquia Technical Assistance Center
Tell more about SVN. I just
Tell more about SVN.
I just installed Acquia by downloading the tar ball onto my linux account and running install. Worked like a champ. Subscribed to the network. Do I need to re-install a different way to use SVN or is it a process that will work as-is? Now's the time if I need to re-install since I've done no customization.
Thx, Stew
Making patches easier to
Making patches easier to install?
Two Steve Whites and a Steve Brown all in the same thread, who woulda thought? :)
Installing patches sure is a pain in Drupal. On my main site (log homes, natch) I'm running Drupal 5.x but working on the upgrade to D6 now so I can try out Acquia.
Are there any modules that make installing patches easier in general? Like a click-to-upgrade sort of interface?
Post new comment