How can I manually upgrade my site?

Question

I have updated my core to 8.9.0, all modules are Drupal 9 compatible and now I want to upgrade to Drupal 9.0.0. I always did my updates completely manually via FTP/web (swap core/vendor/root files, no SSH/drush/composer).

But for 8 to 9 drupal.org has only instructions using drush or composer, unlike the update instructions for Drupal 8 which had an instruction for how to do it manually.

Upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 (or higher) https://www.drupal.org/docs/upgrading-drupal/upgrading-from-drupal-8-to-drupal-9-or-higher

Is there no way to upgrade manually, without SSH/Drush/Composer?

Answer 1

Yes you can. But it needs a little bit of effort beforehand.

You need to have a composerized and version tracked local copy of your site on your computer. All the updating with Composer will happen there then. Look around a bit for Drupal+composerize, there are a few options out already to composerize your site.

From now on, after upgrading/updating your local site with Composer you upload the updated dependencies (the vendor/ directory, the core/ directory, all contrib directories, all libraries directories etc. but also updated scaffolding files like the robots.txt file, the development.services file etc.) to your host via (S)FTP for example and then access your live site's /update.php URL to trigger pending database updates.

As your local site should be version tracked now via Git for example you'll always see which files exactly got updated. For that you may need to adjust the default .gitignore files a bit to only ignore files with sensitive information like the settings.php file. But everything else (the vendor/ directory, the core/ directory, the contrib directories etc.) should better be version tracked to identify changes more easily. When you are done git add . everything and git commit -m "Update project." and git push to some private repo somewhere before you update your project the next time.

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Ah look, there's still one alternative. Although what's been described above should be the recommended way you can follow the guide on Update core manually which tells you that you could Download Drupal zip and then upload certain contents of it to your host replacing the vendor/ and the core/ directory and some scaffolding files. This guide applies for Drupal 9 as well.