Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 14
Administering Your Drupal Site
If you have followed along in the previous chapters, you now have enough knowledge to build a Drupal
8-based website. Building your website and releasing it to the world is an exciting experience, and one that
often brings with it great pride and joy. Whether your site has two or three pages or hundreds, deploying a
website and seeing traffic on it is a rewarding and enriching experience. Deploying your website is just a step
along the journey; it is by no means the end. As the proud owner of a website, you must monitor it, nurture
it, expand it, and support it, all of which are involved in administering your website.
Administering a Drupal website can be a relatively simple task, depending on the size of your site, the
number of users, the number of users who have the ability to author content, and the number of modules
that you’ve installed. Over the past several years, I’ve created a number of personal “pet” project websites
that are up and running, and I rarely do anything other than go out and glimpse at the site logs. There are
other sites that I have built that require more attention, and the amount of attention really depends on the
criteria I just mentioned.
Typical site administration tasks that you will want to consider performing on a periodic basis include
• Backing up the site so you can restore it should anything disastrous happen.
• Backing up the file system.
• Checking the logs to see if there are any errors that you need to address.
• Checking to see if there are any security patches to modules you have installed.
• Checking to see if there are any module upgrades that make sense to deploy on
your site.
• Checking to see if there are any Drupal core updates that you need to deploy.
• Approving requests for new user accounts.
In this chapter, I’ll describe in detail each of these administrative tasks.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Site
If you don’t do anything else on this list of administrative tasks, at least make sure that your data is safe and
recoverable in the case of an unexpected disaster. It’s easy to put off backing up your site, as it’s likely that
you’ll rarely need to go back and restore your site from a backup. But speaking from experience, the first time
you need to restore your site but don’t have a backup is the last time you won’t have backups in place from
the start. Take it from the voice of experience: the few minutes it takes to set up backups are well spent.
157