Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 14 ■ Administering Your Drupal Site
Figure 14-10. Available module and theme updates
In a case where Drupal core is updated, the process is slightly more complex. To update Drupal core:
1. Make sure you back up your database!
2. Make sure you back up your entire Drupal directory!
3. Using Drush, run the following command: drush up drupal.
4. Test your site.
An alternative approach for updating Drupal core is to first back up the modules, profiles, sites, and
themes directories in the root directory of your site, and the .htaccess and web.config files. Once you have
secured copies of those directories, download Drupal core and extract the archive file in the root directory
of your site. The extraction process will place Drupal in a subdirectory with a name of the version that you
downloaded (e.g., drupal-8.0.0-beta7). You’ll need to move all of the files from this subdirectory to the
root directory of your site. To do so on Linux/OS X, use the following commands:
mv * ../
mv .* ../
On other operating systems, use the tools available to you to move files and directories.
Once you have moved Drupal into place, proceed with moving the directories and files that you backed
up into their respective locations in the root directory of your site.
Approving Requests for User Accounts
Drupal lets you, the site administrator, determine how user accounts are created on your website. You can
• Allow site visitors to create their own accounts without approval by a site
administrator.
• Allow site visitors to register an account, but require that a site administrator approve
it before allowing the visitor to use the account.
• Restrict account creation to only the site administrator.
The approach you use is completely dependent on whether you allow visitors to have their own
accounts. There is no reason to provide this feature if you don’t provide interactive features on your site.
If you provide limited capabilities for authenticated users (for example, if you don’t enable permissions for
any administrative features to the generic “authenticated users” category) and you don’t want to be bothered
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