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I have a server and I run around 20 Drupal 7 websites. As I start to get more clients It's becoming increasingly more time consuming doing Drupal core and modules updates.

Is there any way to have a shared Drupal 7 core, libraries and modules (just the main ones that I use as standard like views, context, backup, libraries etc) so I can updated those once and it updates for ALL of my websites. Any site specific modules I would still like to keep seperate.

I'm running a linux server with WHM and cpanel for each account if that helps at all. I also have shell access to my sevrer.

note: that each website is running as a different account on the server so each is an individual vhost.

Any advice on how to manage this would be greatly appreciated

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    I have considered writing patches to Core to be able to keep a server global includes dir, such as /etc/drupal/{modules,themes} or such, but never got around to it. That could be useful for this type of problem, and perhaps someone with a similar problem would be interested in picking this up. – Letharion May 25 '12 at 11:39
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  1. You can symlink the same core into several drupal installs. This works cross vhost.
  2. You can also run several sites on the same Drupal Core in a multi-site fashion. This however requires you to keep a single vhost, so you need to restructure the server config for this.

Note that I recommend against clustering to many sites. If you break a single core, you break all of them. So you would do well to run, say 5, sites per core. Obviously the number should be adjusted depending on how much resources they require and how many sites you run in total.

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  • when I update the master files (ie delete and replace) would that break the symlinks? – cybercampbell May 25 '12 at 11:20
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    If you delete files, then the symlink will be broken until you replace the target file. But if you overwrite the files, you will never have that state. – Letharion May 25 '12 at 11:21
  • @Letharion Please will you come to England and set up my servers for me? ;) – Clive♦ May 25 '12 at 11:24
  • @Clive heh, call my employer and I would love to! :D – Letharion May 25 '12 at 11:28

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