Smashing!

Having taken a step back from migrating this blog over to D8 by waiting for the full release of D8.0.0, time has pushed on!

Starting a D8 project today is a different beast entirely. Rather than download a tar ball and manually installing, it's possible (and nay advised!) to use composer to install. The best project for this currently seems to be https://github.com/drupal-composer/drupal-project

To start from scratch with a blank project using drupal-project:

composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:8.x-dev some-dir --stability dev --no-interaction


So it seems that there's a few issues which hold up a d6-d8 migration, some are essentially core features (Taxonomy term values referenced on nodes do not migrate (D6)), and some which obviously have weight but have failed to garner any attention to date (d6 Imagecache -> d8 Image module migration should be included in core).

More for another day now...

So having fiddled with the migration via drush a little, and having restored the database a few times along the way (thanks drush ard/arr) I now have all my content in D8. Seems like taxonomy terms didn't make it (but vocabularies did).

To get the migration to complete without skipping all the nodes completely I had to apply a patch from Skip the row when we don't recognize the the field type to get nodes working.

Seems like Taxonony terms also need work.

So with the default manifest.yml from d.o, and running the migrate-manifest command:


Running d6_action_settings [ok]
Running d6_aggregator_feed [ok]
Invalid argument supplied for foreach() RequirementsException.php:63 [warning]
Migration d6_aggregator_feed did not meet the requirements. Missing source provider aggregator [error]

So first logical steps besides fiddling with all the features in D8 is to get the migration from this old D6 site setup. So let's begin by enabling the migrate and migrate UI modules.

Next step according to the instructions at Executing a Drupal 8 migration seems to be to ignore the UI entirely and head back to drush again.

So looking with fresh eyes at my semi working version of D8, which was installed via the web based installer it was clear that something was just fundamentally wrong. So as with so many Drupal based activities it seems logical to turn to drush (you'll need the version that works with drush 8 of course) to save the day!

$ drush si
You are about to DROP all tables in your 'abc_123' database. Do you want to continue? (y/n): y
Starting Drupal installation. This takes a while. Consider using the --notify global option. [ok]

So it turns out that my own stupidity (or smart arse idea!) caught me out. I install drupal core in a separate directory out of the web root (docroot!) directory and symlink back to it. My web root looks a little like this:


lrwxrwxrwx autoload.php -> /var/www/src/drupal-8.x/autoload.php
lrwxrwxrwx core -> /var/www/src/drupal-8.x/core
-rw-r--r-- .htaccess
lrwxrwxrwx index.php -> /var/www/src/drupal-8.x/index.php
drwxr-xr-x modules
drwxr-xr-x profiles
-rw-r--r-- robots.txt
drwxr-xr-x sites
drwxr-xr-x themes


So the first challenge has been to get the install working. I seem to be stuck on the Requirements install screen! No combination of file or directory permissions, or manually creating the files and settings.php/services.yml files seems to work.

Fun times!

As this blog is pretty much redundant as anything useful in my personal life, and I tend to put updates and interesting things into Facebook (stupid walled gardens!), I am going to use this blog as a means to document some learnings around Drupal 8 and specifically a move from this install of Drupal 6 directly up to Drupal 8.

Finally got my *rse in gear and have upgraded this stagnant site to Drupal 6, I have disabled the gallery for now as the upgrade was consuming *lots* of memory (eeek). Have switched from the old connections theme to fresh_media for now...