Maintaining Your Drupal Site

Drupal has a dedicated security team, and regularly produces updates to address security issues that are discovered. You should always keep your Drupal site up to date so that you are protected against known vulnerabilities. Updating Drupal can be intimidating, but we have step-by-step instructions to help you do it safely.

Note on Production Sites

Please note that maintaining Drupal should be done on your development site. For production sites, you should build an image from the codebase folder on your development machine, and run that image in production. For more information on this, please see the production install instructions.

Running commands

Once you have a codebase folder, how do you maintain it and keep it up to date? The quick answer is "the same way you maintain any Drupal site with Composer and Drush"... with one small caveat. You most likely do not have PHP or Composer on your machine, and even if you do, you want to make sure you're using the exact same version that your Docker container is using. So to ensure all the versions of things line up, we use Docker to execute Drush and Composer from the Drupal container. The general template for running a command in your Drupal container looks like this:

docker compose exec -T drupal with-contenv bash -lc 'YOUR COMMAND'

You can also just shell into the Drupal container and run commands as well, just be aware that if you shut down your container for any reason, you'll lose your bash history. If you want to shell in to run commands, drop the -T and -lc 'YOUR COMMAND' bits.

docker compose exec drupal with-contenv bash

Updating your Drupal Site

Use Composer to update your site's modules and their dependencies. The working directory of the Drupal container is the Drupal root (a.k.a. codebase), so you don't need to cd into any other directory before running the command. The following command will update all modules and their dependencies that are not pinned to specific versions.

docker compose exec -T drupal with-contenv bash -lc "su nginx -s /bin/bash -c 'composer update -W'"

Note that we run this command as the nginx user. By default, commands are run as root, which can cause some ownership issues when running Composer. By running this as nginx, we ensure that new files are owned by the nginx user.

Permission Issue

When running Composer commands you may come across the following error

[ErrorException]
file_put_contents(/var/www/drupal/web/sites/default/settings.php): failed to open stream: Operation not permitted

This means that Composer is not able to write to your settings.php file. If you run into this error, giving write permission to the nginx user should fix it.

Drupal Database Updates

After getting the newest code, you'll want to use Drush to update the Drupal database and run any other update hooks that have been introduced. However, YOU SHOULD BACK UP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER. You never know when something will go wrong and you don't want to be stuck with an unusable database and no plan B.

make drupal-database-dump DEST=/path/to/dump.sql

Now you can safely update the Drupal database with Drush via

docker compose exec -T drupal with-contenv bash -lc 'drush updb'

If for any reason, something goes wrong, you can Restore the Drupal database at any time by running

make drupal-database-import SRC=/path/to/dump.sql

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Last update: October 11, 2023