Happy December, all! I can’t believe it’s already that time of year (and somewhere in my 2020 addled brain I’m not sure if I think it’s still March or if it’s actually 2022.) I wanted to take a few minutes to chat about the state of Drupal now that core 9.1.x is out!
What Version of Drupal Should You Be Running?
As of the release of 9.1.x, Drupal 8.8.x no longer is receiving security coverage. So! This means that as of today you should be running Drupal 8.9.x OR Drupal 9.0+. You certainly do not have to be running core 9.1.x as of today (although, I don’t see a great deal of reason not to jump to 9.1) but you should make sure you are not running anything below 8.9. Why?
Well, let’s look at what happened in the last two weeks:
2020-November-25 - SA-CORE-2020-013
2020-November-18 - SA-CORE-2020-012
The security team issued two critical security releases back to back, one of which happened outside the normal release cycle due to its severity. While this is a rarity, it does happen. And if you aren’t running a version of Drupal that is receiving security coverage, you will be vulnerable to these issues! So, ensuring that you are running a version of Drupal that is still in the security coverage window should be a top priority. Even if you aren’t ready to update to Drupal 9.0 / 9.1 yet (and you should work towards this ASAP) you absolutely should ensure you’re running Drupal 8.9.x.
Updating to Drupal 9.1.0
The actual update to Drupal 9.1 was not painful at all. The site I updated was already running Drupal 9.0 (and if you are running Drupal 8.x I would probably recommend updating to 9.x first before jumping directly to 9.1.x). All I had to do was:
update my composer.json file to ^9.1 from ^9.0
run composer update drupal/core --with-all-dependencies
run database updates
there were no configuration changes to export (I did run drush cex to be sure, nothing changed on my platform).
You can see the pull request from the Govcon site here.
The database updates I saw look to largely be Claro related:
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Module Update ID Type Description
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system claro_dropbutton_variants post-update Clear caches due to trustedCallbacks changing in ClaroPreRender.
system schema_version_int post-update Update schema version to integers. @see https:www.drupal.orgprojectdrupalissues3143713
views configuration_entity_relationships post-update Clear errors caused by relationships to configuration entities.
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Note that I was updating from Drupal core 9.0.9 to 9.1.0 (as I did both security updates over the last couple of weeks). Your miles may vary depending on where you are, but again, overall this seemed pretty trivial! This is, by the way, a big part of the reason that keeping your site/sites/platform up to date is so important. Even major version upgrades shouldn’t be overly painful if you are “close” to them. If you are doing massive jumps and leaps every time you update (every 6 months or more) then they will “all” be painful because they will all be “big.”
In Conclusion
I cannot express how grateful I am to the Drupal community and the core maintainers for the “new” release cycle that has been our norm since the release of Drupal 8.x. The new process is well documented, regular, and as someone living with it every day (and release) it IS WORKING.
I hope you all take advantage of this stability and keep up to date!
Related Content
An overview of all the things I’ve been trying / testing to get ready for PHP 8.1.