Now, the 9th version of Drupal has been successfully released and the organizations that rely on Drupal 7 and 8 are in a hurry to migrate to the 9th version. However, there are no significant changes included in the 9th version, but the community has already announced the End-of-life of Drupal 8 & 7. Most of the organizations now want to upgrade to the 9th version. Click here

 

As the 9th is the version, there must be some set of requirements one has to fill to migrate to it. So we are here to explain some prerequisites for the 7th and 8th version users to migrate to the 9th one easily.

 

Upgrading from Drupal 7

 

The users of Drupal 7 can migrate to Drupal 8.9 or directly to 9.0. 

 

Server and database requirements

 

The released Drupal 9 requires PHP 7.3 or higher. Plus, the version requirement for Apache has been increased to Apache 2.4.7 or higher. Here is the list of supported database versions by Drupal 9. 

 

  • MYSQL or Percona 5.7.8
  • MariaDB 10.3.7 
  • PostgreSQL 10 with the pg_trgm extension
  • SQLite 3.26 (please verify that your PHP is compiled with this version

 

Database driver handling improvements

 

  • During the update process, please ensure that default databases comply with the minimum version supported by the database driver. And in case, if requirements are not met, the updates will not proceed.
  • If an error encounters when running update.php, install legacy drivers provided as contributed projects.
  • Drupal 9 supported databases have JSON support. So the developers of contributed databases drivers have to monitor the issue and see how it impacts.

 

Now, it comes to migration from Drupal 8 to 9

 

Removal of Drupal 8's deprecated APIs

 

All the deprecated code with Drupal 8 has been removed from Drupal 9.0.0. As we have mentioned in earlier write-ups that the migration from the 8th version is the easiest because of many reasons. One reason among those is many contributed modules are already 

 

Drupal-9-compatible. All you have to do is update to the latest module of the version before attempting to update to Drupal 9. Precisely put, Drupal 9 is the last version of Drupal 8, with its deprecations removed. And you can’t witness any new, backward-compatibility breaking APIs or features. 

 

Ensure every custom module and theme is compatible with Drupal 9. You can use these tools to fix them:

 

  • Drupal Rector
  • Upgrade Rector 

 

When available, update Drupal core to Drupal 9 and run update.php.

 

JavaScript development dependency changes (Now, this is the change you must see before any attempt to migration)

 

As you know that Node.js is a development dependency for Drupal core. But the requirement of Node.js for Drupal core has been updated from 8.11.0 to 12.0.0. It can be installed directly or with NVM. So if you have development dependency on npm, it may affect your site.