[support] Multiple site update and maintenance D6

Cosmo drupallist at dirtsimple.net
Sun Mar 29 10:40:06 UTC 2009


Nik,

The truth is, IMHO, keeping updated your Drupal site(s) is not for the faint
of heart. I use Drush all the time and it works well, but still updates are
tedious work.

I'm not a coder myself and I so wish the Update process would get addressed,
but it is what it is. I think it's coming though because D6 now includes the
Update Status module in core.

Here are the command lines that I use to run Drush (from within the Drush
folder):

On most servers: [./drush.php ]

On my Dreamhost server I must specify the path to php5:
[/usr/local/php5/bin/php drush.php]

If you come up with any scripted means of keeping your sites updated I would
surely like to know.

The only good scripts that I've pushed myself to write/maintain (truthfully,
the core scripts came from the drupal site) is a backup/restore script to
backup all code and the associated database. These scripts also make it easy
to move things in and out of my staging area. I'd be happy to share them if
you need them.


-----Original Message-----
From: support-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org]On
Behalf Of Nik Derewianka
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 8:10 PM
To: support at drupal.org
Subject: [support] Multiple site update and maintenance D6


Hi,

After being spoilt by magento with it's './pear update all' mechanism
to upgrade an entire site and its modules, I am trying to find a way
to manage the updating of multiple drupal installs in as painless a
manner as possible.

My server is running plesk and each client will have their own install
of Drupal.  The suggestions of domain aliases for each site as per
http://drupal.org/node/201322
  is not applicable as it loses all the benefits of plesk (bandwidth
monitoring, seperate client accounts, etc).

Trying to script it all with something like drush would probably be
great, but so far i have been unable to get the drush_extras (in
particular pm) to work at all - i keep getting command not found even
though i have the commands in a command folder in the drush doler as
well as having it in a .drush folder in my home folder.  I think this
may be more due to the fact that drush for D6 is downloadable only as
a HEAD snapshot rather than an actual release that has been tested ???

Another alternative is to look at symlinking the httpdocs folder for
each account to a single drupal install and use drupal in a multi-site
setup.  There are still some drawbacks to this with regards to
permissions and any non drupal files that a client may wish to put in
their account (at say the root level).

Right now, the only clear method seems to be maintaining a bunch of
shell scripts that have to be tweaked every second day to keep up with
the releases for modules.  Even having a http://drupal.org/project/
<name>/latest url scheme would greatly improve this approach.  But
overall this is far from ideal.

But, I guess at the end of the day, how are people managing 10's/100's
of drupal sites and keeping them regularly updated and maintained when
the drupal multi-site functionality does not suit them ???

Thanks,
Nik
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