Installing/Upgrading Drupal Modules

Drupal is a highly extensible system. User-contributed modules add functionality to the core. A list of modules ordered by popularity is available on the Drupal home page. This page explains the process of installing a module.

Installation Procedure

  1. Get the version of the module you want to install from the module's page. For example, the latest versions of the Views module can be found here.
  2. Move the downloaded package into sites/all/modules
    1. cd drupal/sites/all/modules
    2. wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/views-7.x-3.7.tar.gz
  3. Unarchive the downloaded package:
    1. tar xzf views-7.x-3.7.tar.gz
  4. Log in as an administrator
  5. Go to the modules page:
    1. http://newsite.aclweb.org/admin/modules OR
    2. Choose Modules from the menu at the top of the page
  6. Check the box next to the module you want to install (you may have to enable some dependencies first) and hit Save Configuration
  7. You will usually need to run the update script immediately after installing a module. There's a helpful link for this at the top of the page.

If there are no errors, the module is installed!

Upgrade Procedure

The upgrade procedure is the same as the installation procedure, except that you replace the old module with the new one on download. It is usually a good idea to keep the old module around for a bit to help with a quick restore if you run across a bug in the newer version. You can do this by simply archiving the old version.

  1. cd sites/all/modules/
  2. tar czf {modulename}.tar.gz {modulename}
  3. rm -rf {modulename}
  4. Then procede as above. If the new installation dosn't work, you can simply erase the directory you installed and replace it by unarchiving the older version that you kept around.