Updating core to a newer version

Question

I can update Drupal 7 websites core with following instruction from "How to update Drupal core".

1. Make a backup of your Drupal instance (database). (For ex: with MySQL)
2. Download the latest release of your current Drupal version.
3. Extract the [tar ball or zip] Drupal package.
4. Set your site on maintenance mode (For ex: How on D7)
5. Delete all the files & folders inside your original Drupal instance except for /sites and its sub-folders. This assumes that all of your custom work - including themes - is in the recommended spot - the /sites folder tree. If you have made custom changes elsewhere you will need to either preserve them or plan to replace them later.
6. Copy all the folders and files except /sites from inside the extracted Drupal package [tar ball or zip package] into your original Drupal instance location.
7. Some updates do not include changes to setting.php and some do. See There is a way - Comment below for more on this. If the update release includes changes to settings.php you will need to replace your old settings.php in .../sites/default/ with the new one, and then edit the site-specific entries (eg database name, user, and password) in the setting file.
8. If you have modified files such as .htaccess or robots.txt re-apply those changes to the new files.
9. If you have a favicon.ico file that was deleted replace it too
10. Login to your site as administrator or as user no 1
11. Run update.php by navigating to http://...yourdrupalsitename/update.php and follow the process to update your Drupal instance
12. Disable maintenance mode

I want to know the instruction for updating Drupal 8 core (e.g. from 8.0.0 to 8.0.2). How do I do it?

Answer 1

1. Download drupal 8.0.2
2. Extract
3. Copy the core directory into your project.
4. Copy the .htaccess , composer.lock & composer.json files to your project
5. Copy the vendor directory to your project
6. Go to yoursite.com/update.php
7. Follow the on-screen instructions

Note: if you use composer then see my answer to this question

Answer 2

Instead on doing such long and hectic procedure it better to learn and update drupal 8 core through DRUSH.

1. Install Drush for Drupal8.

2. Put your site in maintenance mode through drush.

 drush sset system.maintenance_mode 1

3. Run update command in drush to start update.

drush pm-update

4. Put your site online again

drush sset system.maintenance_mode 0

Answer 3

This page on drupal.org is actually not bad: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/update as well as the overview of options linked from there: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/update/options

I imagine pages in that section have been updated quite a bit since this question was originally posted.

What is confusing is that there are so many ways to update core: manual, drush, composer. Also there are some "gotchas" that I do not see mentioned, such as Drush version 8.1.15 (or higher - but not 9 yet) is needed for 8.4.x and higher.

When I started with Drupal around 2007, you did not need any command line stuff and Composer was not around yet. But today developers really need to be comfortable with command line, and the sooner you get comfortable with Composer, the better. That makes a steeper learning curve for newbies for sure, although you can still install Drupal the same way you did with all previous versions, so one can get at least started that way.

There are lots of blog posts on Drupal & Composer. Jeff's are my favorites: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/tips-managing-drupal-8-projects-composer

Note: I see above "5. Copy the vendor directory to your project". I would not do that as it will wipe out anything in the vendor folder that got put there for modules added. Instead, copy/paste the contents of the vendor folder, replacing or adding to the contents of your current vendor folder.