Automatic Updates
About this Module
Updating a Drupal site is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. It is a tricky problem that, on its face appears easy, however, ensuring secure and reliable updates that give assurance to site owners and availability to site visitors.
The Automatic Updates module is not yet in core. In its initial form, it is being made available as a contributed module. Please note that Automatic Updates is a Strategic Initiative for the Drupal Project. The Initiative is still in progress and additional features and bug fixes are regularly added.
The primary use case for this module:
- Public service announcements (PSAs)
Announcements for highly critical security releases for core and contrib modules are done infrequently. When a PSA is released, site owners should review their sites to verify they are up to date with the latest releases and the site is in a good state to quickly update once the fixes are provided to the community.
- Update readiness checks
Not all sites are able to always update. The readiness checks are an automated method to determine if a site is ready for automatically updating once a new release is provided to the community. For example, sites that have un-run database updates, are mounted on read only filesystems or do not have sufficient disk space to update in-place can't receive automatic updates. If your site is failing readiness checks and a PSA is released, it is important to resolve the underlying readiness issues so the site can quickly be updated.
- In-Place Updates
Once the PSA service has notified a Drupal site owner of an available update, and the readiness checks have confirmed that the site is ready to be updated, the Automatic Update service can then apply the update.
Goals
The Automatic Update service for Drupal aims to simplify the update process and provide confidence that an update will apply cleanly. Updates are currently limited to Drupal Core for tarball (non-Composer managed) websites.
Demo
Watch a demo of the module from DriesNote at DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019.
Installing the Automatic Updates Module
Note: Use (not just installation) of the module on a Composer managed site is not supported.
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Copy/upload the automatic_updates module to the modules directory of your Drupal installation.
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Enable the 'Automatic Updates' module in 'Extend' (/admin/modules).
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Configure the module to enable PSA notifications, readiness checks and in-place updates (/admin/config/automatic_updates).
Automatic Updates Initiative
- Follow and read up on Ideas queue - Automatic Updates initiative