Upgrades to Drupal in production

Question

Does anyone have a good Drupal upgrade strategy for an install that is in production? No one talks about this in books and it's hard to find a definitive answer in forums and email lists.

Ex:

1. Lock down prod, don't allow updates to data copy prod
2. copy prod database to dev
3. turn off all modules in dev
4. upgrade core Drupal in dev (update db if necessary)
5. upgrade modules in dev (update db if necessary)
6. turn on modules
7. test
8. migrate code and db to prod
9. turn site back on

Answer 1

Your strategy sounds good, but it would require a site to be in “read only” mode for quite a while. This is not always feasible. Also I am not quite sure why you would turn on and off all of the modules?

May I propose a slightly different approach

1. copy prod database to dev
2. replicate prod code in dev
3. upgrade core Drupal in dev
4. run update.php
5. test
6. For each module
7. . Upgrade modules in dev
8. . Run update.php
9. . Test
10. Put into maintenance mode
11. Backup database
12. Migrate code to production
13. Run update.php
14. Put back online test

This way there is a lot more testing but less downtime, also you will be able to work out which module breaks things if there is an error. It also dosn't rely on you uploading the DB from dev to live.