Python script that can update both core and contrib modules in a Drupal installation. It also is able to find core and contrib patches and reapply them to the updated core and modules.

We are, of course, perfectly aware of the fact that you're not supposed to hack core, nor contrib modules. However, in reality, Drupal sometimes doesn't leave you much choice. One of the most painful consequences of hacking core or contrib is that updating becomes a major pain. Even if you employ a policy of documenting all core and contrib patches, you still can't be 100% sure that all patches are actually documented. That's were this handy script comes in. It detects the patches that are made in the project, stores them somewhere and reapplies the patches after updating.

The script should be executed from within the Drupal installation root.

cd /path/to/drupal
/path/to/updater.py 

It will ask for a directory to store the found core and contrib patches in. In a Voiture enabled we usally use ../dev/patches or something similar. After you entered a directory it will start the process of updating.

It will output quite a lot of information. Please read the 'What does it do' section thoroughly to understand all output. Pay special attention to output that indicates a failure while applying a patch. These errors will require some manual labor to fix.

This tool is not limited to Voiture projects. It should work perfectly fine in any Drupal installation.

It searches for *.info files in your Drupal installation. Based on these files it builds a list of packages (excluding the *-dev versions) that are downloaded from drupal.org.

It then starts looping over these packages. First, the latest version with the same major version number of the package is determined. If you already run the latest version, it directly continues to the next package.

If the package needs updating, the version of the package that you are running now is downloaded from drupal.org and compared to the package that is in your project. If differences are found, patches are written to the folder that is indicated as patch destination. Then, the latest version of the package is downloaded and extracted over the package in your project. It then starts to try to re-apply the patches.

This is the most tricky part. Sometimes reapplying the patches works out perfectly fine. Sometimes you patched to fix a bug that is now also fixed in the official project and the patch will fail. Sometimes you simply patched a part that is now changed in the original project. If the patch command returns output, the script will display this output. Pay special attention to these outputs. It can mean that the patch is still applied fine, but can also indicate failure.

• Contrib modules are placed somewhere in sites/all/modules. We usually place them in sites/all/modules/contrib.
• Python 2.7.x. We did not test this on any other Python version. However, 2.6.x probably will work, 3.x probably won't.

Copyright © 2012 Hoppinger BV

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.