Quick and Dirty Script to Upgrade Drupal

I run several Drupal-powered websites, and I recently had to upgrade Drupal in order to fix a vulnerability that had been reported. I hate doing the same task over and over so I looked for a way to automate that from the command line. I came up with a solution that worked for me, and I wanted to share it.

First, head to /admin/reports/updates on your website and verify that your Drupal installation needs to be updated. Next, run these commands from the UNIX shell:

#
# Change accordingly based on the version of Drupal you are upgrading to
#
VERSION="6.31" 

mkdir -p ~/tmp/drupal/OLD && cd ~/tmp/drupal/
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-${VERSION}.tar.gz \
   && tar xfvz ./drupal-${VERSION}.tar.gz

#
# Replace with whatever the root directory of your website is
#
cd webserver_root 

#
# Move each file to the "OLD" directory and move in the upgraded version
#
for FILE in `echo index.php includes misc modules profiles scripts themes update.php`
do
     NEW=~/tmp/drupal/drupal-${VERSION}/${FILE}
     OLD=~/tmp/drupal/OLD
     echo "NEW: ${NEW} OLD: ${OLD}"

read more