Now in Drupal, core development has successfully transitioned to a regular release cycle. Drupal releases use the semantic versioning scheme to indicate whether a release is a major, minor or patch release. Since we're committed to making sure our tutorials are kept up-to-date with the latest and greatest version of Drupal we figured it would be a good idea if you knew how to keep your Drupal site up-to-date with the latest point releases as well.
Drupal core uses a regular release cycle to introduce new features and security updates. Contributed modules and contributed themes also have periodic updates to address security issues, add new features, and fix bugs. Updating is the process of moving from one version of a project to another, within the same major release.
Make sure you understand the difference between updating and upgrading. For upgrading a major version, see Upgrade to Drupal's Major Version.
Example tasks
- Perform security updates to Drupal core and contributed modules
- Update Drupal core for a patch version, e.g. from Drupal 9.3.1 to 9.3.2
- Update Drupal core for a minor version, e.g. from Drupal 9.2.x to 9.3.x
- Update a contributed module to a new version
- Keep track of Drupal's minor release and security updates
Confidence
The best-practice for Drupal is to use Composer. There is ongoing work to provide alternatives, but none of those have come to fruition yet. We have high confidence that the information on Drupal.org and in the Drupal User Guide will be updated with current best practices as they evolve. Simply put, this process involves updating the code in your project with the latest code from Drupal.org, so any process that facilitates doing that will continue to work.
Drupalize.Me resources
This chapter of the User Guide provides an overview of security and maintenance concepts and includes step-by-step tutorials on updating the core software, modules, and themes.
For Drupal 7:
External resources
- Updating Drupal core via Composer (Drupal.org)
- Much of the same information as the above resources, though more condensed. Use this if you're already familiar with the process and just need a reminder of what commands to run.